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MEMORIES AND NOTES 

OF 

PERSONS AND PLACES 




LONDON- EDWAHD ARNOLD &.C9 



MEMORIES & NOTES 

OF 

PERSONS & PLACES 

1852-1912 



BY 

SIR SIDNEY COLVIN 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1921 






vv 






PRINTED AT 

THE SCRIBNER PRESS 

NEW YORK, U. S. A. 



CONTENTS 

chap. page 

Dedicatory Letter 7 

I An East-Suffolk Boyhood and some Poets • 13 

II John Ruskin 38 

III Edward Burne-Jones 48 

IV Dante Gabriel Rossetti CO 

V Robert Browning • . . 76 

VI The Priory and George Eliot .... 90 

VII Little Holland House and G. F. Watts . . 93 

VIII Robert Louis Stevenson 98 

IX Fleeming and Anne Jenkin .... 153 

X Box Hill and George Meredith . . .162 

XI William Ewart Gladstone . . . .189 

XII The British Museum and Sir Charles Newton . 201 

XIII On some Aspects of Athens .... 224 

XIV Edward John Trelawny 240 

XV Victor Hugo 253 

XVI Leon Gambetta 274 

XVII At the Land's End of France .... 286 
Index .....•«.. 315 

Portrait of the Author .... Frontispiece 



To 
MY WIFE 



DEAR, I have dedicated one book to you already, 
and have been asking myself to whom I should dedi- 
cate this, which considering my age and infirmities 
is as good as bound to be my last. I thought at 
first of offering it to one or other of those younger 
friends whose attachment is the pride and comfort 
of our declining years. But on reflection it came 
home to me that a dedication to any one of these 
would in truth only be at one remove a dedication 
to you. For it is you who have, if not in the first 
instance brought me all their friendships, as long ago 
you brought me that of Stevenson, at any rate attached 
them to the pair of us in far firmer bonds than I could 
ever have forged by myself alone. And so I conclude 
that the simplest way is to repeat my former offering 
and lay this book also, for what it may be worth, 
directly at your feet. But I shall do so with a differ- 
ence, inasmuch as, following the old practice of the 
Epistle Dedicatory, I shall proceed to remind you, 
and in so doing inform the reader, how the volume has 
come to be what it is. 

Well, then, you know how from very early days I 

7 



8 DEDICATORY LETTER 

began to try my prentice hand at various forms of 
critical writing — for of creative I knew myself incap- 
able — in order to define and if it might be to com- 
municate the pleasures which were to me the salt of 
life. You know also how circumstances drew me before 
long to the special vocation of art critic — I hate the 
label, but it cannot be shirked — and thence to that 
of Slade Professor at Cambridge, and thence to that 
of practical expert and museum keeper. These have 
been my responsible occupations through some forty 
years of my life, and most of such literary work as 
I have found time for has been in connection with them. 
But absorbing as such official duties may have been, 
enjoyable as I may have found them, they were not 
such as to deaden what other interests or faculties 
may have been born or early awakened in me. And 
throughout my museum years, whether at Cambridge 
or in London, I always nursed the hope of one day 
getting free to work no longer upon the productions, 
however treasurable and fascinating, of man's hands, 
but upon objects which had always interested me even 
more deeply still, namely poetry and the scenes of 
nature and the characters of men and women. 

Accordingly soon after my retirement I set to work, 
as you know, upon a task which seemed urgently to 
call for the doing, namely a critical life of the poet 
Keats in accordance with the present state of our 
knowledge. At the same time, being over-sanguine 
as to my own working powers, I entered into an 
agreement to prepare a book in several volumes 
which should in the main be one of personal recollec- 



DEDICATORY LETTER 9 

tions. But of recollections with a difference : — it 
was to be a record of the most lively impressions I 
could definitely recall as having been made upon 
me since boyhood not only by persons but by scenes 
and places, and not only by these but by events and 
movements, more especially in literature and art ; 
and was to include in some cases a comparison of those 
impressions of the moment with such revised opinions 
and judgments as I might entertain to-day. 

But retirement from the public service, in bringing 
me leisure, did not bring me strength, and the wear- 
and-tear of spirit we all underwent during the war 
came to add its effects to the normal sapping power 
of age. Hence it came about that the Keats book 
took a good deal longer to prepare than I had calcu- 
lated. And it soon became clear that I should not be 
able to carry out my other scheme on anything like the 
scale first proposed. All I could hope to do was to 
throw together a certain number, enough between 
them to fill one volume, both of the personal memories 
most vividly present to my mind and of impressions 
of the external scenes which had most interested me. 
The volume so designed is now in your hands. The 
persons, as most readers would, I suppose, desire, fill 
far the larger number of pages. The space they sever- 
ally occupy depends, let it be clearly understood, not 
at all on their relative human or historical importance 
but solely on the much or little that I happen to re- 
member of them. The places described are in a few 
instances inseparably connected with them, but in 
a few others are independent. 



10 DEDICATORY LETTER 

The figures I have tried to call up are for the most 
part those of famous men with whom it was my good 
fortune to come early in life into contact, close or casual 
as the case might be. It was never my habit to 
keep diaries or make notes of conversations, so that 
the matters I have set down are strictly and solely 
such as have chanced to stick in my memory ; the 
single exception being in the case of Shelley's friend 
Trelawny, of my one and only talk with whom I did, 
as it happens, make notes the evening after it had 
occurred. The impressions of places, on the other hand, 
were in two or three instances (indicated in the text 
by dates) recorded promptly after they were received. 

While this volume was planning, I had meant that 
among its contents there should be a full chapter 
on Cambridge. I suppose no son of Cambridge has 
cause to look on his university with more grateful 
affection than I. Going up as a home-taught freshman 
with the vaguest idea how I might stand in comparison 
with school-trained lads of my age, I had the satisfac- 
tion of doing nearly as well as any of them in the classical 
studies which were my choice, and of winning first a 
scholarship and then a fellowship at Trinity. Then, 
after a few years of work as journalist in London, 
promiscuous critical work in which the special study of 
art and the history of art bore a chief place, I was 
offered the opportunity first of going back to the uni- 
versity as Slade Professor, and before long of coupling 
with that pleasant office the other, then newly created, 
of director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. So that 
Cambridge has been in the fullest sense the alma 



DEDICATORY LETTER 11 

mater or kind nursing mother to whom I owed alike 
training and recognition and opportunity. How much 
of sentiment, of haunting love and affection, is mingled 
with the reasoned gratitude and loyalty I owe her is a 
question which I often ask myself and do not find it 
very easy to answer. It is one of the great virtues of 
Cambridge that to false sentiment she is an enemy, 
and that any true partaker of her spirit becomes 
impatient of professions, even by himself to himself, 
that have in them any taint of unreality or claptrap. 
At any rate, of the Cambridge familiar to me 
both as an undergraduate and as a don I had meant 
for the purposes of this book to try and call up 
what living memories I could. But for one thing 
I discovered that some quite indelible impressions 
of particular corners and features and aspects of the 
place, which I had thought might be almost private 
to myself, had been provokingly forestalled more than 
half a century ago by Edward FitzGerald (of whom 
I have to make further mention later on) in that little 
masterpiece Euphranor. For another thing, dipping 
into the volume in which everything that has been or 
could be said or felt about Cambridge, in praise or dis- 
praise or description or recollection in every mood or 
manner for the last three centuries and more, was 
collected with such ingenious industry a few years ago 
by Mr. Sydney Waterlow, I found that I had not so 
much refreshed my mind on the subject, which was what 
I had hoped, as clogged and confused it. For a last 
thing, I had the delight of reading the beautiful pages in 
which Cambridge in general, with Trinity in particular, 



12 DEDICATORY LETTER 

has lately been praised by one of the most learned 
and famous of her living sons, my friend Sir James 
Frazer. But in that delight I found also an effectual 
warning against rivalry. And so it came about that 
Cambridge has slipped out of my scheme. 

With Cambridge have gone certain personalities that I 
should have been glad to keep in, such as those two 
successive masters and stately figure-heads of my own 
college in my early days, Whewell and Thompson ; 
such as the famous classical coach Shilleto, whom I 
can still see in my mind's eye, at his table littered with 
snuff-boxes and bandana handkerchiefs, — still hear 
while he pounds into my sense the stiffest meanings of 
Thucydides ; or such again as J. W. Clark, equally keen 
and accomplished in the pursuits of natural history 
and architectural history and amateur stage-craft ; or 
those two fine contrasted types of classical scholar 
and public orator, W. G. Clark, the most frankly urbane 
and straightforwardly courteous of men, and Jebb, 
probably the most faultless Grecian of them all, whom 
you yourself remember well, and whose tensely 
strung nature and ever-tingling nerves did not prevent 
him from being a successful man of the world and fine 
representative of his university in Parliament — 
But here I am, getting thoughts of Cambridge and 
Cambridge friends in after all by a side door, and 
prolonging my dedication beyond your or the reader's 
patience. So no more, — except one word of warm 
thanks to Sir Philip Burne- Jones and such other friends 
as have given me leave to print letters of which they 
hold the copyright. 



CHAPTER I 

AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 

The older one grows — I believe the observation ia 
trite, and in my case it is certainly true — the more 
vividly does the mind become haunted by its earliest 
experiences, by memories of what one suffered and 
enjoyed and imagined and did or longed to do as a 
child and boy. My mother had a horror of schools for 
her sons, partly founded, I think, for she was a good 
deal of a reader, on the notions she had gathered from 
Cowper's Tirocinium. My dear lovable compliant 
father tenderly humoured her in all things ; and so 
the three of us, of whom I was by several years the 
youngest, were brought up under tutors at home. 
By all that I could ever learn, there was nothing much 
likeable or promising about me whether as boy or 
hobbledehoy ; certainly nothing in the eyes of the 
girl-cousins (we had no sisters) who tried with little 
success to teach me dancing and generally put a polish 
on me. But at least I was dead keen always on what- 
ever I was about, although extremely shy and secret 
in regard to the things I most cared for. The home 
was a country-house three miles from Woodbridge in 
East Suffolk, with five hundred acres of land and more 
of shooting attached. My father loved the place. 

13 



14 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Most of his days were spent in the conduct of his 
business as partner in a leading London firm of East 
India merchants, but in the intervals he could spare 
for home his chief refreshment was to stroll in his gar- 
dens or over his acres, or ride on his big bay gelding, 
Prince, about the country lanes or in and out of 
Woodbridge on his duties as a magistrate. 

Either as merchants or civil servants my people 
on both sides of the house had been connected with 
India for several generations. My mother's father, 
William Butterworth Bayley, whom I remember as a 
commanding and withal humorous grand gentleman 
of the old school, wearing a high black stock and 
swallow-tail coat, had been acting governor-general 
in the interval between Lord Amherst and Lord William 
Bentinck, and for many years after his return was 
chairman of the board of directors of the old East 
India Company. My father's next younger brother, 
John, was in my boyish days lieutenant-governor of 
the North- West provinces. When the mutiny came 
and threatened ruin to our raj and all connected with 
it, I well remember how my father's home and country 
interests were the sole things which enabled the dear 
man at moments to forget his cares — " my most cruel 
cares," as I can still after these sixty and odd years 
hear his agonized voice one day calling them. Cruel 
indeed they were, including besides the prospect of 
public calamity and private ruin the intensest personal 
anxieties for beloved kinsfolk exposed to the horrors 
of the time. Sometimes the strain would end in 
relief, as in the case of my cousin James Colvin, cooped 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 15 

up almost without stores in a hurriedly half-fortified 
bungalow at Arrah, with seven or eight English and 
fifty-odd faithful Sikhs, by a whole horde of Sepoy 
mutineers well armed and provided. " There is much 
in common," writes Sir George Trevelyan, " between 
Leonidas dressing his hair before he went forth to 
his last fight and young Colvin laughing over his rice 
and salt while the bullets spattered on the wall like 
hail." Relief came to this small garrison almost at 
the last gasp ; but more often the issue was tragic. 
A brilliant young sister of my mother's, being with 
child at the time, was forced to ride for her fife the fifty 
miles from Shahjehanpore to Bareilly, and never got 
over it. Most harrowing of all, my aforesaid uncle 
John Colvin in his seat of government at Agra had 
to bear more than almost any other among the great 
civil servants of the stress and burden of the time, 
and died of his task before the final issue was made 
sure.* He and my father had been brought up at 
St. Andrew's together and were devotedly attached ; 
John was the younger but much the stronger of the 
two, and again I can hear my father calling to mind 
aloud in his grief how if any other youngster was bad 
to him " John would always knock him down — always 
knock him down." 

* See J. W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, vol. iii, 
p. 416, " John Russell Colvin died on September 9, 1857, and 
History rejoices to accord him a place in the front rank of those 
who died for their country during that tremendous epoch, more 
painfully and not less gloriously than those who died on the battle- 
field." His life has been written by his son, the late Sir Auckland 
Colvin. 



16 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

My father's love of our country home was not shared 
by my mother. She had imbibed from the writings 
of Ruskin, whom she knew and idolized, an idea that 
hill or mountain majesty was a necessary feature of 
landscape beauty, and a consequent contempt for 
such quiet lowland scenery as that about our home. 
To make up for what she held its poverty she lavished 
care and money on the beautifying of the grounds 
and gardens, matters which appealed also to my 
father, so that for their relatively small scale they 
came to be among the most admired in that country- 
side. She insisted also on a three or four months' 
annual change for the whole household, generally 
to some hired house in the outskirts of London, occa- 
sionally to Devonshire. I do not think either of my 
parents at all realized, readers though they were, the 
literary interests and associations which attached to 
our neighbouring country and coast. Certainly I was 
in youth never made to realize them. To my mother 
I cannot be grateful enough for one thing : she set 
me reading Rob Roy aloud to her when I was eight 
years old ; the other Waverleys followed ; and subse- 
quent years have only deepened and confirmed my 
delight in the imaginary world of which I was thus 
early made free. It used to be a foolish habit among 
superfine and ultra-modern critics, during part of 
my life, to pooh-pooh Walter Scott as no artist, and 
admiration of him as an obsolete fashion. It is a joy 
in my old age to see him coming, among the wiser 
even of the youngest, to be fully acknowledged for 
what he was, that is easily the second greatest creator 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 17 

in our language since Shakespeare, and for all his 
careless ways and long-winded openings an instinctive 
artist in crucial scenes and moments unsurpassed.* 

Going back upon my own boyish cares and pre- 
occupations, I recall in them an odd mixture of the 
civilized and the barbarous. To the passion for Scott 
there presently, before I was fifteen, succeeded a 
passion for Spenser. Entirely for myself and without 
direction, I had discovered the Faery Queene in my 
father's library, and insatiably devoured and set about 
doing my best to imitate it. Not for the world would 
I have let any one into the secret of my absurd attempts 
and ambitions, but on summer mornings not long after 
dawn must needs clamber down from my bedroom 
window, and go off to the stable-shed beyond the 
home paddocks, where a beloved little Arab mare was 
housed, the gift to me of an old East-Indian general 
my godfather, and in her company alone, nursing her 
muzzle the while, sit and spin out of my head the 
stanzas of my poem. The theme, if I remember 
aright, was one of mythical ancient British history 
taken from Spenser himself. But other and for aught 
I can remember alternate mornings were spent not 
less eagerly in visiting, long before the dew was off 
the grass, the night-lines I had laid the evening before 
in the pools of one or the other of our two near brooks 
to catch the big silver-bellied eels : lines barbarously 
baited, for the prey would take no other lure, with the 

* There is a masterly chapter " On the prose of Sir Walter 
Scott " in the Collected Essays of the late, too early lost, Professor 
Verrall of Cambridge (Cambridge University, 1903). 



18 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

unfledged young of hedgerow birds stolen from the 
nest. A certain bandy-leg gad stable-help, I remember, 
was my confidant and instigator in these and divers 
baser kinds of sport, among them rat-hunting with a 
thorough-bred little Dandie Dinmont terrier bitch who 
shared her affections equally between him and me. 
In other and more avowable pastimes, I suppose a little 
later, I was equally keen, as in captaining a village 
team of cricketers, or tramping the turnips after part- 
ridges, or standing waiting for rocketing pheasants 
at the spinney corners, or riding with the harriers 
kept by a neighbouring captain of militia, who, fine 
sportsman as he was and looked on his gallant roan 
Silverlocks, had a somewhat ungrateful task in what 
was essentially not a hunting but a shooting country. 
A clumsy horseman and an indifferent shot, nothing 
could exceed the zest with which I pursued these 
commonplace country sports, unless it were that with 
which in the same years (say from twelve to seventeen) 
I used to devour my Scott and Shakespeare and 
Faery Queene and Modem Painters and Stones of 
Venice (for from my mother I had by this time fully 
caught the Ruskin enthusiasm), and learn long screeds 
of them, both verse and prose, by heart. These 
relatively high-flown literary tastes did not at all 
debar me from delighting in Marryat and Mayne Reid 
and Fenimore Cooper and planning for myself under 
their inspiration futures of the wildest adventure. 

In the same years I was getting some formal educa- 
tion under an elderly tutor, who neither by years nor 
disposition was any sort of friend or companion. 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 19 

But he must have been as capable as he was remark- 
able for his dyed whiskers and corpulent figure and 
choleric temper ; seeing that when the time came for 
going to Cambridge I found to my surprise that I was 
as well on almost in the classics as picked lads from 
the public schools, and in modern languages much 
better. 

Well, from this queerly brought-up boyhood I retain, 
as I began by saying, impressions of nature and of 
natural beauty more intense and abiding than any 
that have been stamped upon me since. Not from 
the holiday sojourns or excursions during which I was 
especially on the look-out for such impressions, as 
in visits to family friends among the Galloway moors 
or on the slopes of the Wicklow mountains, nor even 
from carriage tours taken with my father over the 
then untunnelled Simplon Pass or the length of the 
French and Italian Riviera from Nice to Genoa, —it 
is not from these, anticipate and enjoy them as intensely 
as I might, that the sense of natural beauty sank into 
my soul, but from the unpretentious scenery of home, 
the familiar and daily haunts of my childhood and 
boyhood. Our immediate countryside was not abso- 
lutely level like some parts adjacent, but broken into 
gentle undulations of some eighty to a hundred feet, 
with views of moderate extent from the crown of 
each rise (one rise being actually dignified with the name 
of Beacon Hill), and in each of the hollows a brook 
winding its way through water-meadows towards the 
near estuary of the Deben. A local poet, Bernard 
Barton, to whom I shall presently return, describes 



20 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

faithfully enough the course of one of these brooks 
which he best knew: — 

It flows through flowery meads, 
Gladdening the herds that on its margin browse ; 

Its quiet bounty feeds 
The alders that o'ershade it with their boughs. 

Gently it murmurs by 
The village churchyard, with a plaintive tone 

Of dirge-like melody, 
For worth and beauty modest as its own. 

More gaily now it sweeps 
By the small school-house, in the sunshine bright, 

And o'er the pebbles leaps, 
like happy hearts by holiday made /light. 

Looking back, I find it hard to discriminate which of 
my delights remembered from those days were due 
to pure pleasure of the visual faculties, and which, 
or how much of each, to an admixture of other elements, 
sensuous imaginative or active. Among ocular im- 
pressions pure and simple, some that I retain the most 
vividly are of hawthorn trees in flush and snowy guel- 
der-rose balls and laburnum-lamps magically golden ; 
of the miraculous spray and sparkle of colour and fresh- 
ness in a certain wood, the floor all carpeted with wild 
hyacinth and primrose, wood-sorrel and wood anemone, 
the new-budded twigs all sparkling with points of 
yellow or pale-green light ; of the swaying of alders 
and feathery birch-boughs all day long in summer 
air, and the ruffling of the seas of sorrel-reddened 
meadow-grass beneath them. Of the joy of poring 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 21 

hour after hour over the half-translucent amber 
depths and flickering green reflections of the brook, 
where its pools lay shaded under sweeping chestnut 
boughs. Of crossing a stile at evening into a certain 
favourite high field open to the north and west, whence 
the spirit could go voyaging among the encrimsoned 
archipelagoes of the sunset sky, while dusk and mist 
were dimming the valley at my feet. Of the enchant- 
ment of winter frosts, with icicles fringeing the eaves, 
and every bough and twig of the naked garden trees 
glittering transfigured in the tingling air. Or again 
of Sunday afternoons at church in summer, where 
through the open side-door facing our seats the familiar 
landscape of cottages and meadows and wooded slopes 
lay coursed over by the shadows of travelling clouds, 
while the cawing of the rooks and crooning of the stock- 
doves floated in from the tree-tops to temper the discord 
of the rustic psalmody led by our humpbacked village 
cobbler. Or of poring caressingly on the deep-folded 
splendour and opulent globed softness of the June 
roses, with their colours ranging from the tenderest 
blushing or sallow flesh-tint to reds that deepeued 
almost into black. Or of the delicious half -transparency 
of the yellow and red raspberries with the morning 
dew on them, and the size and succulence of the purple- 
black bursting figs and blushing peaches waiting to 
be gathered warm on the garden-wall, — but here, for 
I did not content myself with looking at them, the 
pleasures of sight merge themselves in memory into 
those of a more carnal sense. 

Turning to joys enhanced by the elements of roused 



22 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

imagination, how often have I sat musing among the 
spreading boughs of a great old Spanish chestnut-tree 
(somehow associated in my boyish mind with the 
Armada), whence the view of the pleasant Playford 
hollow included a few acres of reedy marsh known as 
" the mere " : a name that stirred my imagination 
mightily, and I can well remember how I tried in 
vain — for this mere had no open water — to make it 
serve me for King Arthur's death-scene, or how anon, 
having had the idea thrust upon me that its mud was 
" bottomless," I would convert it into a morass 
tragically fraught with histories of engulfed armies. 

In moods like this the knowledge of the sea's neigh- 
bourhood to our home, and of its sending twice a day 
its marginal waters inland, flooding the mud-banks of 
the estuaries, and lifting and stroking back their water- 
weeds, until it was met by the outflow of our meadow 
streams, — this knowledge helped to dilate the childish 
spirit with a sense of ulterior mystery, and of the 
possibility of great world-voyages lying not remotely 
beyond the horizon lines. I remember this sense 
receiving a queer special point and significance from 
the fact that not far from the place where our two 
brooks, the Lark and the Fynn, having run together 
into one, broaden out to form a tidal creek of the 
Deben, there stood a public house having for sign a 
grotesque carved and scarlet-painted head and shoulders 
of a red lion (the Red Lion of Martlesham) which had 
served, we knew, in old time as the figure-head of an 
ocean-going ship. 

But more, I honestly believe and am not ashamed 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 23 

to own, more than the direct disinterested pleasures 
of the sense of sight, more even than the stirrings of 
an awakened world-imagination, there was a third 
cause which helped in those growing years to stamp 
images of nature upon my memory, and that was the 
excitement of the chasing or sporting instincts which 
went along with them, and which we owe, I suppose, 
to long lines of predatory ancestors. That instinctive 
tension of the nerves and tingling of the pulses in 
pursuit, or at the mere presence of wild creatures 
small or great, disposes the faculties to a peculiarly 
vivid reception and retention of all accompanying 
impressions. At the stage the world has reached, I 
do not see that there is morally much to be said in 
favour of men chasing and killing dumb animals for 
pleasure, or even for the sake of the exercise, which 
some forms of chase involve, of the virtues of physical 
courage, skill, or endurance. Personally, therefore, I 
have long been a convinced if reluctant convert from 
field sports ; yet I cannot but fear that much of our 
truest, deepest and even most poetical love of nature 
may go with them. It is all very well for a sentimen- 
talist like Leigh Hunt to write (as he did more effec- 
tively perhaps than any one since) against the pleasures 
that " strew the brakes with agonies of feathered 
wounds." Hunt was brought up within the precincts 
of Christ's Hospital, with only three weeks' country 
holiday in the year. But take the case of Wordsworth, 
and see with what gusto he recalls his boyish delights 
of bird's-nesting and woodcock-snaring, and how fully 
he acknowledges the share which these excitements 



24 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

had along with others in forging the links that bound 
his soul to nature. For my own insignificant part, I 
know that I should never have felt as I do the charm 
of dew-silvered morning meadows or translucent 
sleeping water-pools if I had not been used as a boy 
to visit them at dawn intent on nothing but seeing 
whether my night-lines were stretched or slack. Nor 
should I cherish half such visions, " felt in the blood 
and felt along the heart," of the red and pale gold 
woods of autumn quivering in bright November air, 
but for the hours I have stood expectant beside them 
with* the gun; nor take half such delight in the soft 
undulations and tender colouring and atmospheric 
mystery of the winter fields, if I had not galloped 
over them with quickened pulses in many a hare-hunt. 
But enough — it is not of myself that I set out to speak, 
but of the country-side where I was brought up and 
of some poets of whom it has been at one time or 
another the home. 

These are perhaps as many and as distinguished 
as any other area of equal extent in England can 
boast, always excepting the strongly contrasted Lake 
Country. It is interesting to note with what different 
feelings they have regarded the country of their birth 
or adoption. Perhaps it is hardly fair to bring in the 
earliest of them, Giles Fletcher (brother to the better 
known Phineas), who in the days of James I held 
the living of Alderton, one of our characteristic coast- 
ward parishes of half-reclaimed heath-land bordering 
upon the marshes of a river mouth. Giles was in 
poetry one of the later and weaklier offshoots of the 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 25 

literary school of Spenser. He had distinguished 
himself while still a bachelor of arts at Trinity with 
his poems Chris fs Victory and Christ's Triumph, and 
had also been an admired preacher of university ser- 
mons in the same spirit of devout and dulcet Christian 
allegory. He was ardently attached to his college 
and university, and languished in his rural preferment, 
finding the people savage and the place unhealthy. 
" He was settled," writes Thomas Fuller, " in Suffolk, 
which hath the best and worst aire in England ; best 
about Bury, and worst on the Sea-Side, where Master 
Fletcher was beneficed. His clownish and low-parted 
parishioners (having nothing but their shoes high about 
them) valued not their Pastour according to his worth ; 
which disposed him to melancholy and hastened his 
dissolution." The worst and best air in England 
indeed! What would the sententious and sagacious 
Fuller have said if he could have foreseen how in the 
whirligig of time opinion concerning the salubrity 
of our seacoast climate would spin round, and how 
Felixstowe for instance (which is only five miles across 
the ferry at the Deben mouth from Alderton) would 
change from the hamlet I can myself remember to some 
mile-and-a-half's length of smart and smiling villa 
frontage, and how guide-books would babble of its 
" invariably invigorating air," and doctors send their 
patients to it from far and wide ? 

Coming down the best part of two centuries from 
the days of the grumbler Phineas Fletcher, we find the 
chief of our East-Suffolk poets, Crabbe, inclined to take 
a view of the local scenes and characters not much 



26 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

less disparaging than his. Our countryside must be 
content to have produced in Crabbe not a lover or 
eulogist, but a son who by natural gift might have 
been almost as pre-eminent in the realist family of 
creative writers as Scott (who always generously insisted 
on seeing in him an equal) in the romantic. Remember 
that when Crabbe had long done his best work Scott 
had only written his poems, things that for all their 
vigour and charm do not strike very deep, and that 
his great creative work of the Waverley novels was 
still to come. In his own day and way Crabbe was 
an actual pioneer without rival in the delineation of 
the scenes, characters, and passions of the humble 
provincial world which he best knew. His life until 
he was near thirty was almost entirely spent at the 
coast town of Aldborough, within a score of miles 
of my home, and from it is drawn the main part of 
the inspiration of the most living of his works, The 
Borough. His volumes were of course in my father's 
book-shelves, but my attention was never called to 
them. Had it been so called, I wonder whether I 
should in some half-conscious way have been put off 
by that prevailing discord between his matter and 
his manner which is, as I think, the great bar to 
Crabbe' s holding the place in our literature he might 
otherwise have deserved. For in spite of the recorded 
high admiration of his work by the finest spirits of 
his own and of a later day — as Scott, Charles James 
Fox, Wordsworth, Byron, Newman, Tennyson, Fitz- 
Gerald — in spite of this, it must be acknowledged that 
with lovers of poetry in general he has failed to hold 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 27 

his own. Squalid tragedy however intense, descriptive 
detail however exact and vivid, unflinchingly stern 
or sarcastically amused veracity and insight in human 
portraiture however varied, have somehow ceased to 
find their way to our .acceptance through a literary 
medium artificial and outworn as was the ten-syllable 
couplet in the mode in which Crabbe employed it. 
When to-day we think of him as a real poet holding 
rank among other poets, it is not the staple of his 
work that we have in mind, but exceptional intensely 
imagined passages such as occur, for instance, in that 
fine dramatic lyric Sir Eustace Grey ; and then we 
cannot but remember how to stir up Crabbe's poetic 
faculty to this pitch it took a severe illness followed 
by a strong remedial course of opium. It is but 
occasionally that in the main body of his narrative 
work he rises into real poetry ; of tenest in the indignant 
vein ; seldomer in that of pathos or tenderness ; in 
that of natural description more rarely still, for his 
quality as an observer of nature is essentially scientific ; 
thus in dealing with the flowers and vegetation of his 
country-side he can never leave out the details that 
shall remind us of his being a fully trained botanist. 
His use of the traditional medium, the heroic couplet, 
sometimes tempts him to make obvious rhetorical 
or epigrammatical points where such points are out of 
place ; sometimes also to employ a stilted or senten- 
tious or abstract phrase where a plain phrase would 
have conveyed his meaning better. But in the main 
he uses the style and language natural to his own 
temperament, and these are not the style and language 



28 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

of poetry at all, but of prose ; and prose does not 
become poetry by the mere fact of being mechanically 
chopped into lengths. Crabbe's true place in litera- 
ture, one often feels, had not the Popeian tradition 
of his day set him on a mistaken track, should have 
been that of a great, in his own day unprecedented, 
master of humble human narrative and detailed 
natural description, but in prose rather than in verse. 
Not that the passion for descriptive detail in Crabbe's 
work implies in him much share of the modern senti- 
ment of nature or delight in nature for nature's sake. 
On the contrary, more exclusively even than other 
and older poets of his age, he judges nature not by 
her power of pleasing the contemplative and disinter- 
ested part of man, but by her aptitude to serve or 
thwart him in his practical necessities. Accordingly 
he condemns and satirizes the scenery, as he does 
the manners, of the Aldborough coast, which had been 
intensely stamped upon his observation and imagina- 
tion from childhood. Not merely does he make it 
a part of the penalty of the abhorred and cruel Peter 
Grimes — 

At the same time the same dull views to see, 
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree ; 
The water only, when the tides were high, 
When low, the mud half -covered and half -dry ; 
The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks, 
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks : — 

not merely does he punish his criminal with sights 
which might interest pleasurably a modern painter 
or lover of the picturesque, but speaking in his own 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 29 

person, he thus resents the colour and variety of the 
unprofitable vegetation of the coast: — 

Lo ! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, 
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor. 
From thence a length of burning sand appears, 
Where the thin harvest waves its wither 'd ears ; 
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, 
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye : 
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, 
And to the ragged infant threaten war ; 
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil ; 
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil ; 
Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf, 
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf ; 
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, 
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade ; 
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, 
And a sad splendour vainly shines around. 

These are examples of Crabbe's descriptive work 
near its best. But a similar or even more minute 
cataloguing method serves him less well when not the 
stationary but the shifting, and less yet when the sudden 
and stormy, phenomena of nature are concerned. 
These need a broader sweep of vision and words more 
concentrated to express them. Turn for instance to 
those contrasted effects of calm and storm at sea 
from the opening of the same poem, The Borough, 
which drew when they were first published the enthusi- 
astic praise of Gifford. The observations recorded in 
the fourteen lines of the storm passage are minutely 
accurate : the last three or four show a true knowledge 
of geological cause and effect ; but I remember to 



30 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

have heard a more effective piece of sea-description 
in half a dozen words from the lips of an inland-bred 
serving woman of that peasant race he knew so well. 
She had been brought to the coast for the first time 
in her life on a ruffling day, and after looking at the 
sea for a few moments said in her Suffolk accents 
and in a tone not of approval, " Wha', do it alluz 
goo muddlin' about like that ? " 

The chief market town and inland centre of this 
region so familiar to my boyhood is Woodbridge, on 
the Deben. Crabbe himself lived there for three of 
his early years, and later it was the home of two very 
unlike and unequally gifted men of letters, both of 
whom held the place and its neighbourhood in great 
affection. These were Bernard Barton and Edward 
FitzGerald, the one belonging to the generation of 
Southey and Lamb, the other to that of Tennyson 
and Thackeray. Bernard Barton, no East Anglian 
by blood but a Cumbrian, served nearly all his manhood 
as clerk in a Quaker bank at Woodbridge. Himself 
a Quaker, he was the embodiment of all that was 
amiable and cultured in that sect, and withal a person- 
age of a singularly fine manly presence and genial 
conversation. He and Charles Lamb had met once or 
twice at the table of Taylor and Hessey the publishers, 
and from those meetings ensued a friendship carried 
on almost entirely by correspondence. It is as the 
" B.B. " of Lamb's letters (one of them including his 
immortal rhapsody on a cold in the head) that Bernard 
Barton is now almost exclusively known to the general 
reader. But his volumes in their day ran through 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 31 

several editions. For one selected and collected edition 
practically all the gentry in the county subscribed, 
and I find my father's name among the rest. But 
his work was valued far beyond local circles both for 
its own qualities of metrical fluency and simple, pious 
benignity of temper, and also as a mild and palatable 
antidote against the Byron fever of the hour. Lamb 
shared this view to the full. " I like them," he writes, 
"for what they are, and for what they are not. I 
have sickened on the modern rhodomontade and 
Byronism, and your plain Quakerish beauty has cap- 
tivated me. It is all wholesome cates ; aye, and 
toothsome too : and withal Quakerish." But else- 
where we find Lamb warning his friend candidly and 
shrewdly against some besetting foibles of his muse. 
" Religion is sometimes lugged in, as if it did not 
come naturally. You have also too much of singing 
metre, such as requires no deep ear to make ; lilting 
measure ; strike at less superficial melodies." These 
simple words of Lamb's leave little more that is to 
the purpose for criticism to say. 

Bernard Barton's view and handling of the East- 
Suffolk countryside is as unlike Crabbe's as possible. 
His poetry is full of praises of the scenery of Wood- 
bridge and its neighbouring villages. His descriptions, 
we may confess, are uncertain in colour and touch, 
and his verses are apt to weary the reader of to-day 
by their shallow fluency alike of thought and sound. 
I have already quoted one set,' descriptive of the water- 
brook, the Lark, at Great Bealings. Here are two 
examples closely pertinent to our theme, and perhaps 



32 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

as pleasant as his work will furnish. The first is on 
Landguard Fort, a solitary, not inconsiderable fortifi- 
cation of an old-fashioned kind built on the extremity 
of a shingle-spit at the mouth of the Ipswich river 
opposite Harwich. It was a haunt of Gainsborough's 
and the subject of his brush in early days, but the 
sentiment of the scene has been marred of late by 
the proximity of the railway station and new villa 
extensions of Felixstowe : — 

Along the sands, and by the sound 
Of ocean, moaning night and day, 
It stands : its lonely burial-ground 
Scattered with low stones, moss'd and grey, 
Whose brief inscriptions fade away 
Beneath the ocean-breeze's spell ; 
And there, beneath the moon's pale ray, 
Still walks the nightly centinel. 

The above little piece has a real charm of conciseness 
and melody : next let us hear our poet when he 
apostrophizes his beloved river Deben: — 

No stately villas on thy side, 
May be reflected in thy tide ; 



No ruin'd abbey grey with years 
Upon thy marge its pile uprears ; 
Nor crumbling castle, valour's hold, 
Recalls the feudal days of old, 
Nor dost thou need that such should be 
To make thee, Deben, dear to me ; 
Thou hast thy own befitting charms 
Of quiet heath and fertile farms, 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 33 

With here and there a copse to fling 
Its welcome shade, where wild birds sing ; 
Thy meads for flocks and herds to graze ; 
Thy quays and docks, where seamen raise 
Their anchor, and unfurl their sail 
To woo and win the favouring gale. 
And above all for me thou hast 
Endearing memories of the past ! 

Well, Derwent and Yarrow, we must once more admit, 
have inspired more thrilling strains. Yet it is pleasant 
to share the idyllic meditations of our lettered Quaker, 
and to read of his genial ways and conversation, of his 
enjoyment and power of making others enjoy, "on 
some summer afternoon, perhaps at the little inn on the 
heath, or by the river-side, or when, after a pleasant 
picnic on the sea-shore, we drifted homeward up the 
river, while the breeze died away at sunset, and the 
heron, at last startled by our gliding boat, slowly rose 
from the ooze over which the tide was momentarily 
encroaching " — it is pleasant to read these things of 
Bernard Barton in the words of his younger friend 
and biographer already mentioned, Edward Fitz- 
Gerald. 

That accomplished Cambridge scholar — scholar alike 
in classic and Oriental tongues — lived for the greater 
part of his life in the retirement of this same country- 
side. His singular intellectual temperament, in which 
originality and culture bore equal parts, found its best 
expression in verse translations which were in truth 
not so much translations as free and finished variations 
on the themes supplied by his text. By blood and 



34 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

descent he was no Eastern Counties man, and indeed 
no Englishman, but pure Irish, his father having been 
a John Purcell married into a family of FitzGeralds 
whose name and arms he took after his father-in-law's 
death. These Purcells had owned large landed estates 
in various English counties, and through an unlucky 
mining speculation had lost them all except one at 
Boulge in East Suffolk. In my early days the head 
of the house was settled at Boulge Hall, some four 
miles from my home. Among other eccentricities this 
FitzGerald was a ranting evangelical out-of-door 
preacher, and in ways and dress and behaviour in 
general so abnormal as to pass among the neigh- 
bouring squires almost for a lunatic. Scarcely less 
eccentric was supposed to be his younger brother 
Edward. I have spoken of him as Barton's friend and 
biographer, not seeking to recall the nearer formal 
relationship in which they stood. After Barton's 
death Edward FitzGerald married his daughter, it is 
supposed from motives of generosity, as she was left 
ill off. But this was one of the actions of his life which 
earned for him his own name for himself, Ballyblunder. 
It was soon followed by a separation, and he 
resumed his former bachelor way of living. He 
lodged, we all knew, over Berry's the gunmaker's on 
the Market Hill in Woodbridge. By report we 
youngsters knew also, not without envy, of the sailing 
yacht he kept upon our neighbouring river the Deben. 
But of his being a writer and the friend and intimate 
correspondent of the most famous writers of his time, 
Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and the rest, we never 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 35 

heard or dreamed. All we saw in him was an odd, tall, 
sad-faced, middle-aged or elderly gentleman wandering, 
say rather drifting, abstractedly about the country 
roads in an ill-fitting suit with a shabby hat pushed 
back on his head, blue spectacles on nose and an old 
cape cast anyhow about his shoulders. Few figures 
were more familiar to me by sight, few less regarded ; 
and many a time must my pony's hoofs have bespat- 
tered this forlorn-looking figure as we cantered past him 
in the neighbouring lanes. Other distinguished per- 
sonages belonging to or frequenting our country-side 
we had been duly taught to recognize and respect. 
There was Sir George Biddell Airy for one, the inde- 
fatigable and world-famous Cambridge mathematician 
and astronomer royal, who had built himself a little 
holiday home in the neighbouring village of Playford, 
to which his mother belonged (and where there had 
lately lived and died another no less celebrity of a 
different kind, Thomas Clarkson, the devoted leader 
of the campaign for the abolition of negro slavery). 
There was Sir William Page Wood for another, the 
brilliant lawyer, afterwards Lord Chancellor under the 
title of Lord Hatherley, who had spent his childhood 
in his grandfather's house at Woodbridge and was a 
constant visitor to a brother-in-law (beautiful old 
gentlemen to look at I justly thought them both) who 
held the living of the parish next our own, Great 
Bealings. But it never entered our thoughts that in 
after life, when these scientific or philanthropic or legal 
distinctions should have faded save in the memory of 
specialists, the brother of the crazy preaching squire 



36 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

of Boulge would be famous with a growing fame 
through all the English-speaking world. All that world 
now knows how he spent his time translating — or shall 
we rather say transmuting — into English, in a manner 
all his own, many dramas from the Greek and Spanish, 
and diverse obscure poems from Eastern tongues, and 
how of all these versions there is one, his rendering 
of certain meditative staves of an old Persian astron- 
omer-poet, which has been found to express most 
vitally and musically, most intimately, most haunt- 
ingly, that which is the ruling mood of our generation 
in face of the mystery of things and of their causes, 
the unsolved problems of human origin and destiny : — 

*Up from Earth's Centre to the Seventh Gate 
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, 
And many a Knot unravelled by the Road, 
But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate. 

There was the Door to which I found no Key ; 
There was the Veil through which I might not see ; 
Some little talk awhile of Mb and Thee 
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me.' 

Needless to say, it is no matter of reproach to our 
parents or teachers that they did not open our eyes 
to the fact of this unrecognized genius living almost 
at our doors ; for in those days (I speak of about 
1855-1865) FitzGerald had either not printed his 
translations, or printed them anonymously and so 
furtively that for all except his intimates they might 
as well not have been printed at all. The admiration 
of a select few, among them Rossetti and his group, 



AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 37 

for his version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 
caused that one translation to be reprinted several 
times, each time with fresh and arbitrary variations, 
by the translator during his life but still without his 
name. It was not until towards 1890, some seven 
years after his death, that the posthumous issues of 
the poem began to get that hold upon the general 
reading public both in England and America which 
has since caused it to be reprinted in edition after 
edition too numerous to count, editions ranging from 
the simplest and cheapest to the most gorgeous, and 
has earned for its author the honour of at least two 
full-dress biographies, the last honour that he would 
have dreamed of or desired. What would he have 
said could he have lived to see that stage spectacle 
founded on his text which is the latest and surely the 
most fantastic development of the cult ? 



CHAPTER II 

JOHN RUSKIN 

Some of the most vivid of my childish and boyish 
recollections are of John Ruskin, whose parents were 
friends of my parents and for whom my mother 
entertained an adoring regard, coupled, I think, with 
the ambition that I, her youngest, should grow up to 
be as nearly as might be such another. From very 
tender years I used to be taken from time to time to 
visit the Ruskins in their family abode on Denmark 
Hill. But from these earliest days I retain less recol- 
lection of the great man himself than of his mother. 
Stern old Calvinist as she was, and more than Spartan 
as had been her upbringing of her own son, she chose 
to make something of a pet of me. I have now before 
me a copy, with its shiny yellow boards all rubbed and 
dingy, of her son's tale for children, The King of the 
Golden River, with Richard Doyle's illustrations, which 
she gave me in 1852, when I was just short of seven 
years old, and which my governess helped me to adorn 
on the back of the frontispiece with a grateful inscrip- 
tion, set in an ornamental border of crimson lake and 
cobalt. A little later, I remember — at least I hope 
it was a little later — she used to regale me on each visit 
with a glass of fine sherry (the house of Ruskin, Telfer 

38 



JOHN RUSK1N 39 

and Domecq were great sherry merchants) and a slice 
of plum cake. It was not until my ninth year that I 
was taken with my two elder brothers expressly to 
see the great man himself and be admitted to his own 
room. He received us raw boys with extraordinary 
kindness, and one thing, I remember, instantaneously 
delighted us. This was a scene between him and his 
white Spitz terrier Wisie (I think there is mention of 
Wisie somewhere in Praeterita). The dog burst into 
the drawing-room just after we had arrived, and not 
having seen his master for some time leapt and capered 
and yelped and fumed about and over him as he sat, 
with a passion, almost a frenzy, of pent-up affection, 
and was caressed with little less eagerness in return. 
Ruskin then took us up to his working-room, and by 
way of giving us a practical drawing-lesson made before 
our eyes a sketch in body-colours of one corner of the 
room, with its curtain, wall-paper and furniture — all 
of them of a type which to the altered taste of the next 
generation would have seemed too Philistine and early 
Victorian to be endured. For very many years I had 
that sketch by me, but fear that in one or another of 
my various changes of domicile it has now got lost 
beyond recovery. During the next few years such 
visits and lessons were several times repeated. But 
the Turners on the walls and their owner's kind 
endeavours to interest me in them used still, I fear, 
to make less impression upon me than the slice of cake 
and glass of sherry with which the old lady never 
failed to regale me. 

This for the first four or five years ; but before I was 



40 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

fifteen I had become intensely sensitive both to the 
magnetism of Ruskin's personality and to the power 
and beauty of his writings. No man had about him 
more— few can ever have had so much — of the atmo- 
sphere and effluence of genius, and when he came into 
the room I used consciously to thrill to his presence. 
In those years, a little before and after the fortieth 
of his age, he was elegant after the fashion of his time 
as well as impressive in a fashion all his own. There 
remains with me quite unfaded the image of his 
slender, slightly stooping figure clad in the invariable 
dark blue frock coat and bright blue neck-tie ; of his 
small head with its strongly marked features, its sweep 
of thick brown hair and closely trimmed side-whis- 
kers ; above all, of the singular bitter-sweet expres- 
sion of his mouth (due partly, as I have always under- 
stood, to the vestiges of a scar left on the upper lip by 
a dog's bite in boyhood) and of the intense weight and 
penetration of his glance as he fixed his deep blue 
eyes upon yours from under the thick bushy prominence 
of his eyebrows (these were an inheritance from his 
father, who had them shaggier and longer than I 
have seen on any other man). The warmth and 
almost caressing courtesy of his welcome were as 
captivating as its manner was personal : in shaking 
hands he would raise the forearm from the elbow, 
which he kept close to his side, and bringing the hand 
down with a full sweep upon yours would hold you 
firmly clasped until greetings were over and talk, 
which generally turned immediately to teaching, 
began. 



JOHN RUSKIN 41 

To such teaching, when it was addressed to myself, 
I could naturally, at my age, only listen in adoring 
acquiescence. But what I loved better still was to 
be allowed, as occasionally happened, to sit by while he 
let himself go in the company of some friend who could 
meet and draw him out on equal terms. It was not 
very often that I saw him, since my people spent the 
greater part of each year in our country home in Suffolk ; 
but for two or three years he was hardly ever out of 
my thoughts except during the hours when they were 
quite engrossed by those rough outdoor sports of hare- 
hunting, pheasant-shooting, village cricket and the like, 
of which I have already spoken. The fifth volume 
of Modern Painters, which appeared when I was in 
my sixteenth year, was a gospel which for a while I 
pored over incessantly and held incomparable for 
insight and wisdom and eloquence ; and by it I was 
led to an equally passionate study of the Seven Lamps, 
the Stones of Venice, and the rest of the early works on 
art. A queer freak of memory comes convincingly 
to remind me how strong must have been the prepos- 
session. On a holiday trip in Ireland I remember 
walking after dinner in the moonlight on the shore of 
one of the Killarney Lakes in company with a grown- 
up guest at the same hotel, a middle-aged Admiralty 
clerk if I recollect aright ; and to break a long and 
awkward silence said suddenly to him a propos of 
nothing, by way of a conversational opening which 
was bound to impress, " I know Ruskin." 

But the phase of absolute devotion and unquestion- 
ing subservience did not last long. Being taken by 



42 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

my father (again I think with an idea of following in 
Ruskinian footsteps) for several carriage tours on the 
Continent in the course of the next two or three years, 
I found myself, rather to my own dissatisfaction, 
beginning to see famous scenes and cities, buildings and 
pictures, no longer purely through the master's eyes 
but through my own. Later again, during my Cam- 
bridge years and afterwards, I seemed unwillingly to 
find, in those parts of his writings which I was able 
to check by my own studies, much misinterpretation 
of history, a habit of headlong and unquestioning but 
often quite unwarranted inference from the creations 
of art to the social conditions lying behind them, with 
much impassioned misreading of the relations of art 
in general to nature and to human life ; everywhere 
the fire of genius, everywhere the same lovingly, pierc- 
ingly intense observation of natural fact ; everywhere 
the same nobleness of purpose and burning zeal for 
human welfare, the same beautiful felicity and persuas- 
iveness of expression, the same almost unparalleled 
combination of utter sincerity with infinite rhetorical 
and dialectical adroitness and resource ; but every- 
where also the same dogmatic and prophetic con- 
viction of being able to set the world right by his own 
individual insight and judgment on whatever matters 
might occupy his mind and heart, the same intolerant 
blindness to all facts and considerations that might 
tell against his theories, the same liability to intermingle 
passages of illuminating vision and wisdom with others 
of petulant, inconsistent, self-contradictory error and 
mis judgment. In short this demigod of my later boy- 



JOHN RUSKIN 43 

hood, though still remaining an object of admiring 
affection and an inestimable source of stimulation and 
suggestion, came to count for me no longer as a leader 
and teacher to be followed except with reserve and 
critical after-thought. 

These were not terms on which Ruskin much cared 

to be accepted, especially by one who had been brought 

as a child to sit at his feet ; and after I had grown up 

and begun to work at the criticism and history of art, 

in my own plodding and uninspired way, as faithfully 

as I could, our meetings were rare and correspondence 

only occasional. Once, I remember, he was gravely 

hurt by some opinions I had expressed in one of the 

quarterly reviews in controversy with his own on the 

relation of art to morals. And when at twenty-eight 

I was appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge he again 

wrote expressing the hope that at any rate I should 

not make my tenure of the chair an opportunity for 

inculcating views in opposition to his teaching from 

the same chair at Oxford. Our terms of intercourse, 

when intercourse occurred, continued nevertheless to 

be those of old family friendship, and I never found 

that his personal presence, whether at public gatherings 

or in private intercourse, had lost its power to charm 

and thrill. One of the instances, I remember, when 

its effect was strongest upon me was at a lecture of 

his at the Royal Institution in which he had occasion 

to recite Scott's ballad of Rosabelle. The whole genius 

of the man, as all those who remember him will agree 

— his whole intensity of spiritual and imaginative being 

— used to throw itself into and enkindle his recitation 



44 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

of poetry. His voice had a rare plangent and pene- 
trating quality of its own, not shrill or effeminate and 
yet not wholly virile, which singularly enhanced the 
effect ; that evening he was at his very best, and for 
those who heard him the " wondrous blaze " never, I 
am sure, gleamed on Roslin's castled rock and the 
groves of caverned Hawthornden so magically before 
or since. 

There was perhaps somewhat less of genius and more 
of perversity in his behaviour one afternoon about the 
same time, when we were both staying at the Scotch 
country-house of a much-cherished and picture-loving 
mutual friend. A tea-picnic having been arranged 
at a special spot as the object of the party's afternoon 
walk, the master broke up the plan by tacitly but 
firmly insisting on walking off and casting about on a 
quest of his own in a different direction. A daughter of 
the house who dutifully attended him remembers 
that the object of his search was an old stone-breaker 
at work beside the road. He was always fond of 
getting into talks with stone-breakers and watching 
their work on the chance of its yielding some inter- 
esting mineral find. To this particular old stone- 
breaker he promised, after several talks, to send a 
book on stones and minerals, and when the old man 
answered that it would be no use because he could not 
read, Ruskin took him at once into warmer favour 
than ever. During the same visit, I remember, his talk 
was at its best and most illuminating in praise of three 
things in our host's collection, an early Rossetti, an 
early Millais, and a drawing by Burne- Jones ; and the 



JOHN RUSKIN 45 

substance of the said talk, being afterwards set down, 
turned into the essay on The Three Colours of Prae- 
Raphaelitism. One of the happiest later encounters 
that I remember was at the house of the same Burne- 
Jones, his all but equal in genius and charm. This 
was during one of the not infrequent intervals when he 
used to be at the height of his powers again between 
two of the fits of mental breakdown to which he had 
become subject after 1879. When two such men were 
pouring out for each other the riches of their minds 
and hearts, any third who had the luck to be of the 
company could do nothing but listen silently and be 
grateful. Later again, at the beginning of 1888, when 
he was an aged and bearded, changed and saddened 
man, I found him simply courteous and businesslike, 
though on the eve, as it turned out, of one of his longest 
and most grievous mental disturbances, when I had 
the opportunity of arranging with him the purchase 
for the British Museum of a precious volume of early 
Italian drawings of the history of the world, by means 
of which I was by-and-by enabled to solve (at least 
in my own opinion) one of the obscurest problems of 
fifteenth century art and to recreate the hitherto 
semi-mythic personality of the father of Italian 
engraving, Maso Finiguerra. 

All the world knows how by degrees and with advanc- 
ing years the passion in Ruskin for opening the eyes 
and awakening the consciences of his fellow-creatures 
not only grew more intense, but extended itself to 
every sphere of human conduct and activity, of ex- 
istence both social and individual ; and how he, in 



46 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

private intercourse the sweetest and most deferentially 
courteous, the most playfully engaging and lovable 
of men, became in public an Ezekiel not to be appeased 
or silenced, an embittered denouncer of all the institu- 
tions, all the practices and traditions, of industry and 
commerce, of exchange, distribution and class organ- 
ization on which the social fabric has in every modern 
community been founded ; and not only of these, but 
of almost all the methods of study and research by 
which the modern mind has striven to investigate the 
truths of nature and turn to account the material laws 
of things. Of the truth and value of these tremendous 
prophetic and denunciatory labours I felt myself no 
more able to judge than any average person who 
accepts because he must the social order under which 
he lives, and holds that the general lot of man can 
only be gradually amended by the collective good- will 
and long-sustained efforts of many generations. The 
path of any solitary world-reformer, however impres- 
sively, however gloriously, gifted, who would suddenly 
refashion the inherited social complex and transform 
the customs, standards, and desires of man by the 
efforts of his single genius must lead, it would seem, 
inevitably to madness, and his efforts to tragic failure. 
Tragic to the direst uttermost would Ruskin himself 
assuredly have deemed his failure could he have lived 
to see the events and tendencies of the last few years : 
the mutual rage of slaughter and destruction between 
nations, the devastated fields and defaced cathedrals of 
his beloved France ; the cleavage, estrangement, and 
suspicion subsisting unabated between rich and poor ; 



JOHN RUSKIN 47 

and in the sphere of art, to name one symptom only, 
the fury of civic vulgarization which in our would-be 
grandest thoroughfares has sacrificed all sense and 
style and fitness to the demon of advertisement, 
giving to the most massive of architectural piles 
unmitigatedly absurd and garish, unstructural ground- 
floor frontages all of glass, the most fragile of things. 
But sad as was in his latter years the personal destiny 
of Ruskin, and futile the apparent temporary issue 
of his toil, the English-speaking race has just been 
unanimously remembering the hundredth anniversary 
of his birth as though it had been that of an acknow- 
ledged world-benefactor. And for the time being it 
looks as though his labours toward social regeneration 
were coming to be regarded by many as the true 
benefaction, while his views on the fine arts and the 
relations of art to life and nature have lost much of the 
influence they had. Posterity alone, and that not an 
early posterity, will have had experience enough to 
assess the relative values of his multifarious endeavours. 
For myself, I can but bear my insignificant witness to 
the debt I owe both to his personality and his genius, 
and to the spell which in early youth they exercised 
upon me. Better than to be taught how to see, and 
what to think and feel, is to be so aroused that one is 
forced to see, think, and feel for oneself : and that 
is what the work of Ruskin did for thousands of us who 
would never label ourselves his disciples. 



CHAPTER III 
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

The next great admiration of my life after Ruskin 
was for Burne-Jones, and this (seeing that he was 
only twelve years my senior) was not of the same 
distantly adoring strain as my boyish cult of Ruskin 
had been, but of a kind much more equal and com- 
panionable. Enthusiasm for his work had made me 
seek his acquaintance even before I had taken my 
degree at Cambridge, that is some time in 1886-7, and 
the charm of his personality completed what love for 
his painting had begun. As soon as I came to London 
and took up journalism — principally as art critic on 
the Pall Mall Gazette in its early days under the fighting 
editorship of Frederick Greenwood — I began to lay 
about me on his behalf against the dunder-headed 
majority of critics, for such I held them, who belittled 
or derided his gift. He himself was from the first 
too much absorbed in his creative tasks to concern 
himself much about criticism whether hostile or 
friendly ; and fortunately he had from the first had 
friends and backers whose appreciation saved him 
from any serious danger of the wolf at the door: 
Rossetti foremost, then fellow-artists and craftsmen 
like Morris, Birket Foster, Arthur Hughes ; very soon 

48 



EDWARD BURNE-JONES 49 

afterwards Ruskin ; and before long, wealthy collec- 
tors like Mr. W. Graham and Mr. Leyland. But 
in my own early life both the zest of public battle on 
his behalf, and the pleasure of being often with him 
in such spare hours as he could afford his friends 
of an evening or on Sunday, counted for very 
much. 

In the then state of English painting, the appeal, 
which is the special business of that art, to the sense 
of visible beauty or significance in things, to that 
faculty which perceives and insists on the harmonious, 
the suggestive and striking relations and combina- 
tions of forms and colours in the world, was made 
almost exclusively in the representation of remote 
or romantic subjects. There were one or two excep- 
tional and finely gifted men, like George Mason and 
Frederick Walker, who brought the instinct of design 
and the paramount aim at pictorial value and effect 
into their treatment of scenes of actual life and nature. 
But from the average popular art depicting scenes 
and figures of ordinary life the attempt to appeal to 
such sense had almost entirely passed away, and people 
had got used to looking at pictures not for any truly 
pictorial value they might possess, but simply for the 
sake of the story they more or less expressively told 
or the scenery they more or less accurately reproduced. 
The result was a kind of shallow reflection of obvious 
aspects of life and nature, leaving out all the characters 
which more finely attuned senses could discern in 
daily things or a more active power of selection and 
arrangement impose on them. The half -century from 



50 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

then till now has happily made a vital difference for the 
better in the quality of every-day art. Almost any 
exhibition of to-day will show plenty of work bringing 
out and turning to true, unforced pictorial account 
the latent impressiveness and suggestiveness for the 
eye residing in every common sight that nature or 
man's toil provides, were it only the chimneys of a 
group of factories against the sky, or the iron framework 
of some new building with its cranes and girders, or 
the clashing chaos of coloured advertisements on a 
street hoarding. So also in portraiture, instead of 
the arbitrary imposition on a sitter of some accepted 
and more or less abstract type of feature or expression, 
any current exhibition will show a search for and 
insistence on something characteristic which is really 
there, and which by sensitiveness of seeing and render- 
ing can be made to yield a result human and pictorial 
in one. 

In the days of which I speak, half a century or more 
ago, almost the only kind of painting in England which 
possessed true pictorial quality and made its appeal 
specifically to and through the eye was, as I have said, 
and paradox as the statement may sound, the painting 
which called up and visualized not every-day appear- 
ances of life and nature but themes of poetry and 
imagination. The stimulus of such themes moved 
a certain class of artists to the effort, not to " illus- 
trate " them in any commonplace sense of the word, 
but to create a corresponding world of forms and 
colours, " visions and dreams and symbols," making 
to the ocular sense a parallel appeal to that which the 



EDWARD BURNE-JONES 51 

themes themselves made to the literary sense and 
imagination. To this kind of painting it was the 
masterful spirit of Rossetti which gave the dominant 
impulse, although of the two arts which he himself 
practised he was more really accomplished in verse 
than with the brush. It was Rossetti who had ordered 
Burne- Jones (his advice to his friends was always virtu- 
ally an order) to attack at twenty-two the practice of 
imaginative and poetic painting without any of the 
usual preliminary training of hand and eye. From 
this first impulsion, or compulsion, and from study of 
the earlier painters of Italy together, Burne-Jones 
drew the impetus which, working in his own intense 
and intensely personal artistic temperament, carried 
him on, after a few trying years of derision and neglect, 
through a full career of passionately strenuous labour 
to ultimate recognized success. I have neither the 
space nor the purpose here to discuss the quality of 
his life's rich output of imaginative and decorative 
work : hardly even to glance at the kind of attack 
nowadays sometimes directed against it from a new 
point of view, by those who declare that painting 
must appeal to the eye and the visual emotions only 
and stop there — that any sign of mind or meaning 
behind the visual effect is a positive blot on a picture 
and makes of it " literature in two dimensions " and 
the like. Stuff and nonsense ! Of course— and it 
should need no saying — the primary and essential 
appeal of every picture must needs be to the eye, by its 
harmonies and rhythms of line and colour, its balancings 
and massings and proportions and contrasts of light 



52 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and shade, and by their direct effect upon the visual 
emotions. If such appeal and such effect are not 
forthcoming, or if they fail, the picture is naught ; 
but if they succeed and the picture is a picture indeed, 
then the more of mind that can be felt behind it, the 
richer the associations and suggestions it conveys, the 
better. 

Full as are the gifts of mind to be discerned behind 
Burne-Jones' work, rich as are the imaginative associa- 
tions it calls up, it represents only a part of the wealth 
and colour of his being. For one thing, notwithstand- 
ing all its beauty, its felicity and inexhaustible original 
invention in colour a nd linear design, as far as concerns 
the human types it depicts it is in the main of a melan- 
choly cast. Hostile critics used to be continually 
harping on the fact that to nearly all his figures, 
whether designed singly or in groups, in repose or in 
action, he was prone to give looks of wistful, unsatis- 
fied longing, sad eyes and mouths, a pining droop 
or yearning out-thrust of the head from the shoulders. 
Let it be granted : such was in truth the prevailing 
instinctive and involuntary cast of his imagination. 
And why not ? Must not every artist whose work 
comes from any depth of soul be governed by his own 
personal cast of imagination — just as, to take two 
instances far removed in time as in kind, Botticelli 
and J. F. Millet were governed respectively by theirs ? 
And is the world we live in, and is the heart of man, 
so made that in the depths of any great man's soul 
there is not likely to reside an instinct of yearning and 
craving, not likely to be harboured a passion of unsatis- 



EDWARD BTJRNE-JONES 63 

fied spiritual quest and hunger ? Such a strain of 
innermost, still hankering soul-hunger, such a vital 
habit of the being, truly lay deep in Burne-Jones's 
nature and could not help expressing itself in his work. 
But in his human and social relations other strains 
in him prevailed, partly, perhaps, because he chose 
that prevail they should. " Never at any time in 
his life," writes with perfect truth his widow, " did 
his ordinary manner betray to others the sadness to 
which, in common with all sensitive natures, he was 
subject. This was, I believe, owing to a principle 
which I find formulated in one of his letters : ' I hold 
it a point of honour with every gentleman to conceal 
himself, and make a fair show before people, to ease 
life for every one,' — and partly to the cheerful effect 
which companionship always had upon him." At all 
events in company he charmed no less by a rich 
laughter-loving gaiety than by his surprising range 
of knowledge and attainment and the ease and beauty 
and simplicity of language with which he brought them 
to bear in conversation. 

Born amidst relatively straitened surroundings at 
Birmingham, Burne-Jones had from boyhood found 
means to be a devourer of books, and at Oxford and 
afterwards had received from the brotherly companion- 
ship of William Morris a continually renewed stimulus 
and sympathy in the studies they both loved. His 
mind was in one sense the fullest — and that was in its 
range over and grasp of the imaginative literatures of 
the world — that I have known. Vast as was his life's 
output in his own art, and tied as he was to the easel 



54 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

every day and almost all day, that he should have found 
time for so much .reading seemed a miracle. Ancient 
classic literature, the whole range of mediaeval legend 
sacred and profane, Celtic legend and poetry, Scandin- 
avian legend and poetry, the poetry and romance of 
Persia and the East, the history and fabled or recorded 
aspect of all the storied cities of the world, he seemed 
to possess them all, not as dry learning, but as living 
matter of brooding thought and delighted imagination. 
Whatever new thing one might have chanced to learn 
within this range of such subjects, one always found 
that he had known it long ago and better. According 
to the occasion he could expatiate on any such matter 
in an abounding vein of eloquence, always classically 
pure and simple, or sum up the gist of what he had to 
say in two or three pithy words. Among his letters 
to me I find one hitherto unpublished which will give 
the reader a more vivid impression of his mind and 
manner in relation to such studies than any words of 
mine could give. I had little knowledge of Celtic 
legendary lore or of its sources, and had been reading 
as something new to me the great national Irish legend 
of Deirdre and Cuchulain (" The Sons of Usnach ") 
as turned into modern poetry in Aubrey de Vere's 
volume of 1882. I had some personal acquaintance 
with that very lovable and accomplished, then ageing 
Irish gentleman and poet, who in his youth had enjoyed 
the friendship of Wordsworth and was the life-long 
intimate of John Henry Newman, Henry Taylor, and 
the Cambridge group which included Tennyson and 
Monckton Milnes. There was truly more of culture 



EDWARD BURNE-JONES 55 

and charm than of fire and inspiration in his verse.* 
Nevertheless I had greatly enjoyed the reading, and 
wrote as much to Burne-Jones from a house in the 
Isle of Skye, overlooking the Sound of Sleat, where I 
was staying with his friends and mine the William Gra- 
hams. This is his answer, written from the summer 
quarters at Rottingdean which he had lately secured 
for himself and his family : the date is some time in 
1882 or 1883. 

ROTTINGDEAIT. 

My dear S. C. — 

If I write red hot from your letter it will be best— else I know 
what will happen — I was so glad to hear from you and about 

* Here are three stanzas by way of specimen for those who do 
not know his work. 

But Deirdre at the grave-head stood alone, 
The surging crowd held back by holy dread ; 

Her face was white as monumental stone ; 

Her hands, her garb, from throat to foot were red 

With blood — their blood. Standing on life's dark verge 

She scorned to die till she had sung their dirge. 

* Dead are the eagles three of Culan's peaks ; 

The lions three of Uladh's forest glades ; 
The wonders three of Alba's lakes and creeks ; 

The loved ones three of Etive's fair young maids : 
The crownless sons of Erin's Throne are sped : 
The glories of the Red Branch Order dead. 

* Is there who dreams that, now my Naisi's breath 

Is stilled, his wife will tarry from his side ? 
Thou man that mak'st far down yon cave of death, 

Be sure thou dig it deep, and dig it wide ! 
There lie the Brothers Three ! 'Tis just, 'tis meet 
Their Sister take her place before their feet.' 



56 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

friends too — who are out somewhere on the map. I once looked 
on the map for them, but fled in despair — there seemed to be float- 
ing islands and one very very far off was Skye — I know they are 
beautiful, I know all about them — I have travelled everywhere — 
seen all places — but my home is Florence where Giotto lived — 
nothing can lure me or charm me away. 

Aubrey de Vere sent me his book (woe is me I haven't acknow- 
ledged it) he does love the stories but I can't read them except 
in their first barbaric shape — they can't be done by any one — 
but he does really love and know all about them and is a bard 
with a harp, but not the harp that once . . . 

I do nothing — I can't — the clockwork in my head went wrong 
and buzzed and I can't wind it up again yet — I shall stay here 
till the end of the month at least. I am brown and spotted and 
red and fat and bald and drowsy— drowsy always — but not sleeping 
well for all that. 

R. Dean is the noisiest city in the world — from 2 in the morning 
when the earliest cock begins till 10 at night when the last yelling 
baby is put to bed it is one pandemonium of noise — but out on 
the downs it is peace like at the beginning of time. 

Your aff. 

Ned. 

Modern imaginative literature of the best kind 
Burne-Jones possessed in a scarcely less degree than 
ancient, at least so much of it as is to be read in English ; 
his two chief favourites being (as they are the favourites 
of every wise reader) Walter Scott and Dickens. As 
the books of Louis Stevenson came out successively 
he gave them a place in his affection next almost 
to these. 

I find the following letter written soon after the first 
publication of the Child's Garden of Verses in 1885 and 
going into the question of a possible illustrated edition : 



EDWARD BURNE-JONES 67 

also recording his first and I think only personal 
meeting with R. L. S. : — 

The Grange, 

West Kensington, W. 
My dear S. C, — 

I can't think who should be The one. Crane only occurs to 
me. All his fancies would be pretty and full of a hundred inven- 
tions. I wish I had time to have a try at it — but it is no use to 
think of that, for my days are full to the brim — still I keep thinking 
over the matter and still Crane comes uppermost in my mind, his 
Grimm was lovely, and he is now so experienced in making them 
colour his designs properly that it seems a pity not to apply there, 
where at least there is certainty of excellence, and a chance of 
something better — it is a heavenly book — we haven't a Richter, 
never have had one and it's a pity. 

Would it be useless to ask Leighton ? He draws babies with 
real rapture and it would cost him little trouble — but no one is 
like Crane for designing borders and making ornaments, and he 
would festoon the book divinely if he were in a good mood. 

Your aff. Ned. 

It was a lovely evening with L. S. and I loved him. I wish 
he was fat and well and like a bull and lived here. 

" Ha ve y ou read Catriona ? " he exclaims, in a letter 
written soon after the appearance of the book, some 
eight years later, — 

You didn't tell me, and if you had you must have talked of 
it, for it is a wonder, and every page glittere, and I can't make 
out why the Speaker doesn't read it to the House of an evening 
— much better for them to listen to it than to each other's nonsense. 
I am right glad he has made a woman at last, and why did he 
delay ? this one is so beautifully made. Oh, he's a miracle of a 
lad, that boy out there in the Cannibal Islands ; I wish he would 
come back and write only about the Borderland. 



58 MEMORIES. AND NOTES 

In Dickens what Burne-Jones loved especially were 
the parts most riotously comic. I can see and hear 
him now shouting with laughter as he echoed the 
choicer utterances of Sam Weller or Micawber or Mrs. 
Gamp, his head flung back and beard in the air (in 
early days it was the fine forked and flowing red-brown 
beard depicted in Watts's well-known portrait, but later, 
one grizzled or grizzling and shorter trimmed). And he 
was very capable of original Dickens-like observations 
and inventions of his own. No one had a quicker or 
more healthily amused sense, without sting or ill-nature, 
of the grotesque and the absurd in ordinary life. No 
one loved better to make or had a better gift for making, 
by speech or pencil, happy fun and laughter with his 
children and grand-children. In these last he took 
in his later years an especial delight, and loved not 
only to draw but to show off to his friends the sturdiness 
and dimpled fatness of their infant limbs. Let those 
who desire to form a just idea of him begin by realizing, 
if they can, not only his constant and most winning 
sweetness and affectionateness of accost, and a certain 
indefinable note of innate distinction — something more 
finely bred than can be imparted by mere breeding 
— in all that he did and said and was, but also the 
love of and capacity for jolly mirth and caricature 
which subsisted along with the more wistful, brooding 
and craving elements in his nature. He could be 
delighted on occasion with any extravagance of melo- 
drama, and it was a sight to see him hunch his shoul- 
ders up to his ears and glower as he repeated in hollow 
tones from a once popular stage-play the appalling 



EDWARD BURNE-JONES 59 

query, " Did you ever see the Danites ? " All these 
attractive and attaching personal qualities naturally 
drew in his later years a widening circle about him, 
and he became a celebrity socially sought after and 
well known. But he never allowed social calls to 
bring about a day's relaxation of his industry or the 
smallest abandonment of his ideals. To none of his 
old friends, of course, did the slightest change ensue 
from the honours which were almost thrust upon him 
and which both for his art's and for his children's sake 
he thought it right to accept. When his oldest and 
closest friend of all, William Morris, with whom he 
had worked and thought and felt all their lives in the 
closest brotherly association, threw himself headlong 
into the cause of socialism, Burne- Jones would not follow 
him, holding that an artist's first and paramount duty 
was to his art, and knowing that in his own case at 
least the artist's life and the politician's or agitator's 
were physically as well as morally incompatible. But 
this partial sundering of their ways did not bring 
about the least jar or breach of friendship between 
the two. For myself, I retain no memories of him 
that are not entirely endearing. 



CHAPTER IV 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 

Looking back lately through volumes of the West- 
minster Review some half a century old, I found under 
the date January 1871 an essay near thirty pages 
long enthusiastically quoting and praising the poetical 
writings, both translated and original, of Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti. Recognizing the essay for my own, 
I was freshly reminded of the fascinated admiration 
which possessed me in those days, youngster as I was, 
for the poet-painter and his work. By the time I 
left Cambridge I already took intense pleasure in 
some of his early paintings which I knew in the houses 
of friends ; and I held (as I still hold) his renderings 
from the early Italian poets, first published in the 
volume of 1861, to be unmatched among feats of verse 
translation for graceful, unforced fidelity to the spirit 
and even in most cases to the letter of the originals. 
Drawn moreover by the glamour which invested 
Rossetti's personality as the main inspiring focus 
and source of impulse whence had sprung all I most 
cared for — that is whatever is most imaginative and 
impassioned — in the English art of the time, I asked 
Burne- Jones to take me to him ; was kindly received ; 
and saw much of him throughout the years 1868-1872, 

60 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 61 

which were somewhat critical and fateful years of 
his life. 

I had come into his circle of course too late, and 
with the Cambridge stamp and direction too definitely- 
impressed upon me, to undergo the full dominating 
force of his influence such as it had been exercised 
some dozen years earlier, when he suddenly determined 
the careers of men like Burne- Jones and William Morris, 
or earlier yet when along with Holman Hunt and 
Millais he was a leading spirit in the original Prae- 
Raphaelite movement. The best days of his life 
were indeed already over. Since the tragic death of 
his wife his passionately craving and brooding nature 
had been gradually losing command over itself. He 
had let himself live with growing recklessness, and 
having begun to suffer from habitual insomnia, was 
falling into the chloral habit by way of remedy. 
Everything was preparing in him for a constitutional 
breakdown : but even to intimates such preparation 
was as yet scarcely apparent, and to a newcomer 
such as I was alike the man himself and his surround- 
ings and way of life were irresistibly, if somewhat 
weirdly, impressive. 

About the surroundings and the way of life so much 
has been written that I shall pass them over quickly. 
The handsome old red-brick house in a row looking 
on the Chelsea reach of the Thames ; the combined 
gloom and richness of its decorations, the sombre 
hangings, the doors and panellings painted in sombre 
dark-green sparsely picked out with red and lighted 
here and there by a round convex mirror ; the shelves 



62 MEMORIES . AND NOTES 

and cupboards laden with brassware and old blue 
Nankin china (in the passion for collecting which 
Rossetti was, if I remember rightly, an absolute pioneer); 
the long green and shady garden at the back, with its 
uncanny menagerie of wombat, raccoon, armadillo, 
kangaroo, or whatever might be the special pet or pets 
of the moment ; the wilful, unconventional, unhealthy 
habits and hours ; the rare and reluctant admission 
of strangers ; all these things have already been made 
familiar by repeated descriptions to such readers as 
are curious about them. So have the aspect and 
bearing of the man himself ; his sturdy, almost burly 
figure clad in a dark cloth suit with the square jacket 
cut extra long and deep-pocketed ; his rich brown 
hair and lighter brown, shortish, square-trimmed 
beard, the olive complexion betraying Italian blood ; 
the handsome features between spare and fleshy, with 
full, sensual underlip and thoughtful, commanding 
forehead in which some of his friends found a likeness 
to Shakespeare ; the deep bar above the nose and 
fine blue-grey colour of the eyes behind their spectacles ; 
and finally, the round, John-Bullish, bluntly cordial 
manner of speech, with a preference for brief and 
bluff slang words and phrases which seemed scarce 
in keeping with the fame and character of the man 
as the most quintessentially, romantically poetic of 
painters and writers. 

During the years of our intercourse it was Rossetti's 
poetry more than his painting that interested and 
impressed me. His earlier water-colours, those of 
the Dante cycle especially, comparatively unambitious 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 63 

in scale and technic as they were, seemed to me (and 
still seem) to give by their fine new inventive colour- 
harmonies, their passionate intensities of expression 
and their rare originality and often, though not always, 
their beauty of group-composition and pattern, a more 
satisfying idea of his genius for painting than his 
ambitious oil pictures on the scale of life. It was at 
these latter that he had been principally working, 
from Mrs. William Morris, Miss Marie Spartali, Miss 
Wilding, and one or two other favourite sitters, for 
some time before I knew him. Single figures among 
them, looking straight out of the frame — a Pandora, 
a Sibylla Palmifera, a Venus Verticordia — possessed 
indeed a fine inventive gorgeousness of colour and an 
impressive mystical voluptuousness, or voluptuous 
mysticism, of their own. But for figures on the life 
scale in less simple attitudes, or for combinations of 
them, his powers of design and execution seemed never 
fully adequate, and a certain unpleasant streakiness in 
the handling of the oil medium, with certain exaggera- 
tions and mannerisms in the drawing of lips, throats, 
and other features made that long and sumptuous 
series of his later embodiments of the eternal feminine 
to my mind less and less admirable as time went on. 
But Rossetti's poetry, both by its own power and 
by the manner in which I learned to know it, for the 
time being enthralled me completely. The story is 
well-known how, in a passion of grief and remorseful- 
ness at the time of his wife's death, he had buried 
the original bundle of his manuscript poems with her, 
laying it in her coffin among the rich strands of her 



64 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

red-gold hair. Of a few of these buried poems he had 
drafts or copies by him, and would sometimes, when I 
first knew him, read out from them to a small circle 
of his intimates. With one consent these used to urge 
him to have the whole packet of the poems exhumed 
for publication, and I on my part joined eagerly 
in the plea. At last he yielded, and the necessary 
legal permission having been obtained the exhumation 
was carried out under the eye of Rossetti' s friend and 
factotum of the hour, Charles Augustus Howell. (A 
digression concerning this brilliantly plausible, capable, 
and entertaining, totally unscrupulous and untrust- 
worthy Anglo-Portuguese intriguer, the satellite in 
these years first of Ruskin and afterwards of Rossetti, 
would in this place be tempting but must be forborne ; 
the more so as his history, far liker fiction than real 
life as it was, has been fully set out by another hand.)* 

The manuscript poems having been rescued, and 
the question of their publication having next to be 
considered, Rossetti used on many evenings to read 
out from them to a few invited guests after dinner. 
He was good enough to care, or seem to care, somewhat 
specially for my opinion, and consulted me, both ver- 
bally and in many letters which I have lately re-read, 
about the revision of the poems and the order in which 
they should stand in the proposed volume, in the end 
adopting most of my suggestions. 

But the readings themselves were among the marking 
events, and remain among the golden memories, of 
my life. Most of the poets I have known have had 
* See Murray Marks and his Friends, by 0. 0. Williamson (John Lane) . 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 65 

their own special way of reading, and it was generally 
interesting or impressive to hear. Rossetti's way was 
not dramatic in any ordinary sense of the word. It 
was rather a chant, a monotone ; but somehow he 
was able with little variation of pitch or inflection 
to express a surprising range and richness of emotion. 
His voice was magical in its mellow beauty of timbre 
and quality and in its power to convey the sense of a 
whole world of brooding passion and mystery, both 
human and elemental, behind the words. A kind of 
sustained musical drone or hum with which he used 
to dwell on and stress and prolong the rhyme-words 
and sound-echoes had a profound effect in stirring the 
senses and souls of his hearers. There are certain 
poems or passages of poems, the fierce visionary and 
imprecatory stanzas of Sister Helen — the " rose 
shut in a book " couplets from Jenny — above all, 
perhaps the sad, slow-trailing cadences of the lyric, 
A Little While — 

A little while a little love 

The hour yet bears for thee and me, 
Who have not drawn the veil to see 

If still our heaven be lit above. 

Thou merely, at the day's last sigh, 
Hast felt thy soul prolong the tone ; 

And I have heard the night-wind cry, 
And deemed its speech mine own, — 

there are poems and passages, I say, like these which 
still haunt my ear, and will haunt it to the end, exactly 
as they were sounded from the poet's lips on those 
evenings half a century ago. Heard and judged for 



66 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

the first time under these conditions, the poetry of 
Rossetti naturally impressed me profoundly, and 
moved me to a higher pitch of critical admiration 
than I should have felt — though the pitch would still 
have been high — had I known them for the first time 
in print. 

Moreover it was an hour when lovers of poetry were 
rather specially hungry and thirsty for something that 
should satisfy their appetite for poetic passion and 
romance. Tennyson, at the height of his fame and 
power, had just published the first volume of his 
Idylls of the King. After In Memoriam and Maud 
these Arthurian idylls had been to many of us a grievous 
disappointment. In spite of their sustained and subtle 
filagree finish of execution and many exquisite passages, 
we felt that they were but tame drawing-room versions 
of the great Arthur legends, versions into which the 
taint of the Victorian age and of Victorian ethics and 
ideals and constraints and politenesses had passed 
with paralysing effect. And we found ourselves all 
the more thrilled and satisfied by the full-blooded 
splendour and passionate colouring and imagery of 
Rossetti' s work. On the appearance of the volume 
Swinburne instantly wrote glorifying it in his most 
excited vein of critical panegyric. And for what my 
own help might be worth, I rushed to review and 
praise it in as many quarters as were open to me. 
Will it at all interest the reader of to-day to see, by 
some specimens from my Westminster Review article 
aforesaid, the kind of welcome which Rossetti's poems 
got from a raw but sincere youngster familiar with 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 67 

his translations from the Italian and in love with the 
kind of imagery which came natural to him as painter 
and poet in one ? After trying to make clear the way 
in which his special strain of imagination resembled 
that of the early Italian poets in that it instinctively 
invests with human and personified shape every passion 
and experience of the soul, and how in this kind of 
poetry the mystical and the pictorial tendencies work 
together : — 

The subtle passages of overburdened consciousness (I go 
on to say), the inner and fugitive experiences of the spirit, to be 
expressed, as here, in terms of material imagery, demand that the 
figures of that imagery should undergo conditions, movements, 
transformations of too fleeting and too vague a kind to bear com- 
plete mental realization : this is consonant with the mystical 
tendency, while on the other hand it is consonant with the pictorial 
tendency to endow its concrete figures with a reality so vivid, and 
attributes so visible, that the mind cannot avoid their complete 
realization ; and hence, endeavouring to follow them through all 
their vicissitudes, is apt to feel thrown out when these elude the 
conditions of material possibility. This, we think, may be a 
difficulty to arrest the reader at a sonnet like that headed " He 
and I "; or to make his full enjoyment of the wonderful four 
headed " Willowwood " a matter of time and familiarity ; or to 
leave something still wanting from the perfection of the following, 
called " Stillborn Love," so admirable in its structure and diction? 
so striking for its heat and volume of passion, so pregnant and 
pathetic with its suggestion of immortal amends for the frustration 
of to-day : — 

The hour which might have been but could not be, 
Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore, 
Yet whereof life was barren, on what shore 

Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea ? 



68 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Bondchild of all consummate joys set free, 

It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before 
The house of Love, hears thro' the echoing door 
His hours elect in choral consonancy. 

But lo ! what wedded souls now hand in hand 
Together tread at last the immortal strand 

With eyes where burning memory lights love home ? 
Lo ! how the little outcast hour has turned 
And leapt to them and in their faces yearned : — 

" I am your child : O parents, ye have come ! " 

Turn to the pair of sonnets called, " Newborn Death," in which 
the embodied personages of Life, Love, Art, Death, Song, float 
before us in lineaments of such new and moving loveliness as belong 
to the very rarest region of the imagination ; or to any of the 
love-sonnets, such as those headed " Lovesight," " Winged Hours," 
" Life-in-Love," "Parted Love," "Broken Music," "The One 
Hope," which in the fulness and richness of their imagery seem 
to give the most fitting and harmonious as well as the most adorned 
expression to phases of feeling themselves too full and rich for 
simple utterance ; phases which lie between joy and grief, and 
are more complex and involved than either ; in which feeling does 
not absorb or exclude thought, but informs and inflames it for 
prospect and retrospect as well as for the passion or the present- 
ations of the moment ; so that the buoyancy of delight is clogged 
with the recollection of its delay, the impetuosity of rapture checked 
with the wistfulness of apprehension or chilled with the shadow 
of foreboding ; the bitterness of loss involved with the reminiscence 
of triumph or the augury of reparation ; pain and pleasure for 
ever interwoven, and each shot through with the consciousness, 
the presentiment, the possibility of the other. 

. . . The fragmentary House of Life, besides its fifty sonnets, 
contains also some highly -finished pieces of different lyric form; 
most of these too dealing with the fatalities or forebodings of 
thwarted passion. The three melancholy and searching stanzas 
of the song called " A Little While," are quite admirable for their 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 69 

careful concentration, as well as for the reluctant andante of their 
metrical movement ; while, by way of contrast, the succeeding 
" Song of the Bower " storms with sonorous anapaests in full 
charge, and tells out the dire constraint of separation in tones only 
a little weakened (as it seems to us) by something of commonplace 
in the imagery and language of verses two and three. But there 
is no poem of this division better done, or more answering to inward 
experiences, than one having nothing to do with love, but casting 
into new articulateness a phase of that vague commerce with eternal 
things of which from time to time a man is conscious, when one or 
another of the large dealings of nature laying hold upon him seems 
to loosen the sensuous bands of the spirit, and lift it abroad into the 
knowledge of some divine environment, some uncomprehended 
unity of natural with human and spiritual with bodily things. The 
suggestion comes in this case through the avenue of hearing : — 

Listen alone beside the sea, 

Listen alone among the woods ; 

Those voices of twin solitudes 
Shall have one sound alike to thee ; 

Hark, where the murmurs of thronged men 

Surge and sink back and surge again — 
Still the one voice of wave and tree. 

Gather a shell from the strown beach 

And listen at its lips : they sigh 

The same desire and mystery, 
The echo of the whole sea's speech. 

And all mankind is thus at heart 

Not anything but what thou art : 
And earth, sea, man, are all in each. 

. . . Turning to those contents of the volume which do not 
belong to the House of Life, a poem of things near at hand and 
of yesterday — and of to-day and (alas !) to-morrow also — is that 
called " Jenny." A monologue suggested by the sight and presence 
of a sleeping harlot was a thing from which the English muse might 
have been held bound to shrink. But the manner of its treatment 



70 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

here is such as to have given offence, so far as we know, to no 
reader or critic — a manner perfectly direct, but perfectly free from 
evil enjoyment. What the poem does is to set forth, with poetical 
intensity and ornament, such a chain of thoughts as might present 
itself to any man of scholarship and imagination, and of a certain 
vivacity of the conscience, under the circumstances. Such thoughts 
would naturally be full, as these are full, with the burden of all 
that evil which presses itself upon some minds as a thing that 
cannot be cured, upon others, as one that must not be endured — 
of the curses and contrasts of civilization, and the mysterious 
confines of good and evil. The fairest thing to do is to quote at 
length that portion of the poem which contains its two leading 
and most elaborate images, the imaginative beauty and force of 
which will come home to every reader, as well as the technical art 
which has thrown into the eight-syllable metre so much of varied 
and involved sweetness, and led up to the concluding passage in 
such culminant and portentous thunder : — 

... If but a woman's heart might see 

Such erring heart unerringly 

For once ! But that can never be. 

Like a rose shut in a book, 
In which pure women may not look ; 
For its base pages claim control 
To crush the flower within the soul ; 
Where through each dead rose-leaf that clings, 
Pale as transparent Psyche- wings, 
To the vile text, are traced such things 
As might make lady's cheek indeed 
More than a living rose to read ; 
So nought save foolish foulness may 
Watch with hard eyes the sure decay ; 
And so the life-blood of this rose, 
Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows 
Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose : 
Yet still it keeps such faded show 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 71 

Of when 'twas gathered long ago, 
That the crushed petals' lovely grain, 
The sweetness of the sanguine stain, 
Seen of a woman's eyes, must make 
Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache, 
Love roses better for its sake : — 
Only that this can never be : — ■ 
Even so unto her sex is she. 
. . . Like a toad within a stone 
Seated while Time crumbles on ; 
Which sits there since the earth was curs'd 
For man's transgression at the first ; 
Which, living through all centuries, 
Not once has seen the sun arise ; 
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, 
The earth's whole summers have not warmed; 
Which always — whitherso the stone 
Be flung— sits there, deaf, blind alone ; — 
Aye, and shall not be driven out 
Till that which shuts him around about 
Break at the very master's stroke, 
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, 
And the seed of man vanish as dust : — 
Even so within this world is Lust. 
. . . What any poet is going to be for another generation, it is 
not given to his contemporaries to tell. But what Mr. Rossetti 
in his own generation is may be put on record ; and that is, the 
poet of personal passion — for all such as know or can sympathize 
with personal passion in a shape in which, being most paramount 
and engrossing, it is yet not most direct or most alone, but in which 
it takes up and carries along with it all collateral elements of the 
being — and the more modern, the more highly organized and 
endowed the being, the more complex and manifold these elements 
^vill be — re-awakening and illuminating all forms, all pressures 
past, adding intensity to existence, charging and complicating 
the consciousness with images from far and near. 



72 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Rossetti had little or none of Burne-Jones's fine self- 
sufficient indifference to criticism. It is not true, as 
has been said, that he took undignified pains to ensure 
that reviews should be favourable. Swinburne of 
course for one, and I for another, were absolutely 
unsolicited volunteers in the cause. But when there 
appeared the late Robert Buchanan's preposterous 
attack upon him, at first pseudonymous and then 
unveiled, in the pamphlet called The Fleshly School of 
Poetry, he was both agitated and angered beyond 
measure. In this matter again I did my best, together 
with a group of other ardent friends and admirers, 
and this time by the master's desire and request, to 
stand by him and make things as hot for his assailant 
as we could. At the same time I succeeded in dissuad- 
ing him — I had forgotten the fact, but am reminded 
of it by his brother's biography — from printing a satiric 
effort of his own against the enemy which struck us 
as neither dignified nor effective. 

I have scarcely left space to speak of the humorous, 
burlesque-loving elements which subsisted in Rossetti' s 
nature alongside of the darkly passionate and mystical 
elements. They were somewhat singular in their kind 
and were often exercised frankly and light-heartedly 
at the expense of those about him. In writing they 
showed themselves chiefly in the composition of 
" Limericks " on the characters of his friends. He was, 
at any rate while his days of tolerable health lasted, 
in practice a model of good friendship, somewhat 
masterful and domineering, it is true, among those of 
his inner circle, but infinitely generous withal both in 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 73 

word and act, loving to praise whatever he saw worthy 
of praise in any one's work, prompt and eager to help 
any one in difficulties with money or whatever form of 
service might be most needed — in a word, essentially 
bon prince. But at the same time he had the shrewdest 
eye for his friends' faults or failings, and the neatest 
possible knack in exposing such faults or failings in 
rhymes which he was apt to troll out with gusto in 
their hearing and never expected them to resent. For 
instance, he had gladly and often taken in and housed a 
certain prae-Raphaelite landscape-painter called Inch- 
bold. The recipient of this hospitality seeming by and 
by somewhat inclined to abuse it, Rossetti wrote, — 

There's a troublesome fellow called Inchbold, 
With whom you must be at a pinch bold, 

Or you may as well score 

The brass plate on your door 
With the name of J. W. Inchbold. 

Sometimes the rhymes would take off, quite harm- 
lessly and pardonably, some physical trait of their 
subject, as this concerning a senior member of the 
circle, the shrewd, thoughtful, and interesting but 
technically less than half-accomplished Scottish artist 
and verse-writer, William Bell Scott. Scott, a man 
by this time bald and ageing, was commonly known 
among his friends as " Scotus " : — 

There's a crabbed old fellow called Scott, 
Who seems to have hair but has not; 

Did he seem to have sense 

A still vainer pretence 
Would be painfully obvious in Scott. 



74 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

That is all very well ; but could the same friend be 
expected to take it kindly when the essential weak- 
nesses of his talent were faithfully and scathingly hit 
off as follows ? — 

There's a queer kind of painter called Scotus, 
A pictor most justly ignotus ; 

Shall I call him a poet ? 

No, not if I know it, 
A draggle-tailed bungler like Scotus. 

Scott may in truth very likely never have heard 
the second of these staves : but had he heard and 
resented it he could scarcely have paid off the score 
more ill-naturedly, and at the same time more inaccur- 
ately, than by his treatment of Rossetti in his post- 
humously published Autobiographical Notes : a book, 
I may allow myself to remark by the way, which I 
have found almost unfailingly inexact in every one of 
its statements that I have had means or occasion to 
check. In the floating memories and traditions con- 
cerning Rossetti, many of these compositions were 
long current and some are current still. There is one 
which I never heard much repeated, and which begins — 

There's an eminent critic called Colvin, 
Whose writings the mind may revolve in, — 

but wild horses would not drag from me the sequel; 
neither does the stave appear in the collection of some 
two dozen such included by the late William Michael 
Rossetti in his encyclopaedic (and surely too pro- 
miscuous and ponderous ?) volume of his brother's 
collected works. On the other hand I find in 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 75 

that collection a piece of execution which is new to me, 
performed on the above-mentioned Howell after his 
dismissal : — 

There's a Portuguese person named Howell 
Who lays on his lies with a trowel ; 

Should he give over lying 

'Twill be when he's dying, 
For living is lying with Howell. 

I have said that the years 1868-1872 were critical 
and fateful years in Rossetti's life. He had already 
begun to take chloral as a resource against sleeplessness, 
and the habit grew upon him with disastrous effects. 
His extreme perturbation under the " Fleshly School " 
attack showed a mind already morbidly tainted. A 
few months later he underwent a complete breakdown, 
almost assuming the form called in French manie des 
persecutions. He harboured torturing suspicions of 
malice and treachery even against his best-tried friends ; 
and though making for a while a fairly complete re- 
covery, and continuing to paint and write with variable 
power, but as busily as ever, for near ten years more, 
was never again quite the man that we had known. 
I saw him relatively little during those last years, 
and had little acquaintance with the new friends and 
satellites — some of them truly attached and helpful — 
who gathered about him and from among whom have 
come the fullest accounts written of him after his 
death. 



CHAPTER V 

ROBERT BROWNING 

No greater contrast in character and mode of life 
could well exist than between Rossetti and Browning : 
the one living apart in a seclusion that had about it 
truly something — though not so much as has been 
represented — of the morbid and mystical ; the other, 
having once determined to face daylight and the 
world again after the great tragedy of his wife's death, 
carrying out his determination resolutely and healthily 
to the full. Probably there is no instance on record 
of a great poet leading at once so strenuous a poetical 
and so busy a social life as Browning during his last 
twenty or twenty-five years. The contemporary writer 
par excellence of social verse, Frederick Locker, later 
Locker-Lampson, had at one time seen a good deal 
of the world, but for the most part of a very distin- 
guished and selected world, and in later life was 
relatively a recluse, continuing to carve and polish his 
exquisite poetical cameos at a distance from the 
crowd. But Browning, hardly ever pausing to let 
the energies of his intellect and imagination rest 
from exploration in all manner of fields of human inter- 
est remote or near, was at the same time spending 
himself lavishly in social relations of the most active 

76 



ROBERT BROWNING 77 

and varied kind. To meet him during those years 
was for many of us, though always a lively pleasure, 
not an event but a matter of course, seeing that one 
was apt to meet him at concerts, theatres, picture- 
galleries, dinner-parties, country houses, in a word 
everywhere. My own acquaintance with him began 
in the latest sixties or earliest seventies in a certain 
hospitable, historic castle on the Cumberland border, 
than which no house is associated in my mind with more 
grateful and cordial memories. This was Naworth, 
near Brampton in Cumberland, one of the two family 
seats of the Earls of Carlisle, romantically placed on 
the steep side of a glen overhanging a beck which 
runs down to meet the Irthing near Lanercost Abbey. 
It was the country home at that date of George Howard, 
afterwards ninth earl, and of his wife Rosalind, by 
birth a Stanley of Alderley. No more exceptional or 
attractive young couple gathered about them in those 
days a more varied company of talents and distinctions 
whether in art, literature, or politics. George Howard 
had married fresh from Cambridge, where he was a 
couple of years my senior. His ambition was to be a 
painter, and he worked sedulously at the art under 
the teaching of that fine austere craftsman and vigor- 
ous, caustically tongued personality, Alphonse Legros. 
Besides his painting George Howard cared for nearly 
all forms of culture. He had a range of manner varying 
from the most captivatingly cordial and urbane to 
the cynically sceptical and ironic. He was a born 
lover of Italy and things Italian. Nature had even 
modified towards the Italian his strongly marked 



78 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

hereditary Howard type of countenance, and in Tus- 
cany, where the features of the people generally are 
apt to bear a special stamp of race and finish, I have 
often enough observed to myself in driving through 
some provincial market town, " Why, here is a whole 
population of George Howards." His wife was in 
those early days as keen in many interests and as warm 
in all friendliness as he, with a peculiar winning and 
whimsical charm of looks and manner all her own and 
extremely attaching. Changes of view and develop- 
ments of character came to both in later life, including 
on the lady's part an extreme and all-absorbing 
development both of political ultra-radicalism and 
militant temperance zeal. But for some years from 
the time of which I speak their homes both on the 
Northumberland border and in London were centres 
of a delightful hospitality, and to the opportunities their 
friendship afforded me my life owes much, which it would 
be ungrateful not to record. The American sculptor 
and author William Wetmore Story was a fellow-guest 
with Browning and myself at Naworth at the time of 
which I write. They two had long been intimate in 
Italy. Story was a man exuberantly alive and of talents 
the readiest and most versatile, acquitting himself with 
an equally robust and confident facility in monumental 
and portrait sculpture and in the arts of prose, verse, 
and conversation. He was half Italianate in vivacity 
of gesture and manner, and I remember with what 
amused interest the rest of us sat by and listened while 
he and Browning lustily kept up between them hour by 
hour the ball of anecdote and reminiscence and repartee. 



ROBERT BROWNING 79 

Loudness of voice and a vigorous geniality of bearing 
were what, on the surface, chiefly distinguished Brown- 
ing from other Englishmen in social life throughout 
these years. Needless to say, the veriest oaf could 
not have mistaken them for vulgarity. The poet's 
biographer and most confidential friend, the late 
Mrs. Sutherland Orr, used to say that they were origin- 
ally the mask of a real shyness and diffidence on first 
confronting, in advanced middle life, the ordeal of 
mixed general society. I should rather have supposed 
that they were the natural symptoms of an inborn 
vital energy surpassing by fivefold those of other men. 
Certainly the poet's shortish robust figure, held always 
firmly upright with the powerful grey-haired and 
bearded head a little thrown back, his cordial greetings 
and vigorous confidential and affectionate gestures, 
would have conveyed the impression of such vitality, 
even had the same impression not been forced upon 
those of us who were readers by the surprising prodigal- 
ity in these years (I speak of the early seventies) of 
his work in literature. He had but lately brought to 
a conclusion the vast and varied dramatic and psycho- 
logic complex of The Ring and the Book, surely one 
of the most strenuous, and as might have been sup- 
posed fatiguing, intellectual feats ever achieved by 
man, and instead of resting proceeded promptly to 
follow it up by fresh volume after volume ; breaking 
into classic ground in a guise wholly his own with 
Balaustiori 's Adventure ; indulging in the queerest 
of contrasted freaks in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau 
and FifLne at the Fair ; going on with Red Cotton 



80 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Night Gap Country ; returning once more to Greek 
themes and bidding us live with the Athenian dramatists 
in Aristophanes'' s Apology ; and so on, with seldom 
so much as a year or two's pause in the output. It 
is a curious fact that in spite of the intensity of intel- 
lectual and emotional effort to which for the most 
part they bear witness, Browning's poetical labours, — 
excepting, no doubt, those he was accustomed to 
read aloud among his friends, — were wont to leave 
little trace or echo in his own memory. Was, this 
perhaps because of their very rapidity and abun- 
dance ? Such was at any rate the case ; and I remem- 
ber with what amused gusto he related one day how 
a lady friend had been reading him out certain verses, 
and how he had slapped his thigh (a very characteristic 
action, by the way) and said, " By Jove, that's fine " ; 
how then she had asked him who wrote them and he 
could not say ; and how surprised he was when she 
had told him they were his own. 

Browning's talk had not much intellectual resem- 
blance to his poetry. That is to say, it was not apt 
to be specially profound or subtle ; still less was it ever 
entangled or obscure. Probably the act of speech 
did not allow his brain time to perform those prodigies 
of activity by which it was wont, when he had the 
pen in hand, to discover a thousand complications and 
implications and side-issues beneath the surface of 
the simplest-seeming matters ; complications which 
often he could only express by defying the rules of 
grammar and discarding half the auxiliary parts of 
speech, by stitching clause on to clause and packing 



ROBERT BROWNING 81 

parenthesis within parenthesis, till the drift of his 
sentences became dark and their conclusion undiscover- 
able. (The mere act of writing seemed to have a 
peculiar effect on him, for I have known him manage 
to be obscure even in a telegram.) Rather his style 
in talk was straightforward, plain, emphatic, heartily 
and agreeably voluble, ranging easily from deep earnest 
to jolly jest, rich and varied in matter but avoiding 
rather than courting the abstruse whether in specula- 
tion or controversy, and often condescending freely to 
ordinary human gossip on a level with the rest of 
us. Its general tone was genially kind, encouraging 
and fortifying ; but no one was more promptly moved 
to indignation, indignation to which he never hesi- 
tated to give effect, by any tale or instance of cruelty 
or calumny or injustice : nor could any one be more 
tenderly or chivalrously sympathetic with the victim 
of such offences. Not to quote instances known to 
me of a more private and personal kind, I remember 
his strong and re-iterated expressions of anger against 
Froude for having, as he thought, misrepresented the 
character of Carlyle. Instead of being the hard man 
figured in Froude's pages — inconsiderate in relations 
with his wife, unkind, in one instance at least, in his 
treatment of a horse — Carlyle, maintained Browning, 
was the most intensely, sensitively tender-hearted of 
men : and he went on to tell how, as he walked one day 
in Chelsea with Carlyle' s arm in his, a butcher-boy drove 
by savagely flogging his horse and he felt the sage shake 
from head to foot in a spasm of righteous indignation. 
Browning, living in the world the everyday life he 



82 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

did, refused with perfect unaffectedness to accept 
incense or to assume poses or privileges as a poet. 
At the same time the poet was never far to seek in 
him, and with equal unaffectedness would come to 
the front readily on occasion. If the talk ran that way- 
he would quote passages from the English poets, 
oftenest relatively unknown passages, with powerful 
effect ; for his failure of memory in regard to his own 
works by no means extended itself to those of others. 
His memory was well stored with all kinds of eccentric 
matter, and among the earlier English poets with 
examples of those whose work most resembled his 
own by quaintness and toughness of thought. Thus 
I recollect his coming out once with a long, crabbedly 
fine screed from John Donne, and declaring he had not 
read nor called it to mind for thirty years. It was the 
screed in which Donne, who had written defying and 
belittling the power of death, now, death having carried 
off a virtuous and excellent lady of his acquaintance, 
recants and declares — 

Spiritual treason, atheism 'tis to say 
That any can thy summons disobey. 
Th' earth's face is but thy table ; there are set 
Plants, cattle, men, dishes for death to eat. 
In a rude hunger now he millions draws 
Into his bloody, or plaguy, or starved jaws. 
Now wantonly he spoils, and eats us not, 
But breaks off friends, and lets us piecemeal rot. 
Nor will this earth serve him ; he sinks the deep 
Where harmless fish monastic silence keep ; 
Who — were Death dead — by roes of living sand 
Might sponge that element, and make it land. 



ROBERT BROWNING 83 

I remember also particularly the rich effect with 
which, though only for my private ear, he recited 
one evening, on a sofa in a corner after a dinner party, 
the thundering final stanzas from the Song of David 
of Christopher Smart : — 

Glorious the sun in mid career ; 
Glorious th' assembed fires appear ; 

Glorious the comet's train : 
Glorious the trumpet and alarm ; 
Glorious th' Almighty's stretched-out arm ; 

Glorious th' enraptured main : 

Glorious the northern lights astream ; 
Glorious the song, when God's the theme ; 

Glorious the thunder's roar : 
Glorious hosanna from the den ; 
Glorious the catholic amen ; 

Glorious the martyr's gore. 

This unfortunate eighteenth-century poet, stale and 
flat except for that one inspired hour during his 
insanity when he became equal to the greatest, was 
at that date unknown to most of us, but had always 
a special interest for Browning, and is the subject of 
one of the Parleyings in his almost latest volume of 
verse. 

When asked to read poetry of his own in any house 
or in any company where he could count on intelligent 
sympathy, Browning was always ready to do so. His 
utterance was flexible and dramatic, very different 
from that of Tennyson or Rossetti and such other 
poets as have preferred in reading their own verses 
to adopt and sustain one key or another of chanting 



84 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

monotone. His voice, virile above all things, was 
strong and inclining to the strident ; but in passages 
which called for it had accents of the most moving 
tenderness. One reading in especial which I remember 
as bringing out such tenderness was that of the Pompilia 
section of The Ring and the Book, at certain points in 
which he could control neither his voice nor his tears, 
and had nearly all his audience in tears with him. 
Another reading almost equally moving was of Andrea 
del Sarto ; which in one case he followed up by way 
of contrast with the long tramping measures, duly 
stressed by his foot stamping vigorously in time, of 
his Greek battle-poem, Echetlos. Neither were such 
readings the only occasions when I have known this 
strong man weep. One of my vividest recollections 
is of an evening when he made one of a party of three 
to see the great Italian tragedian Salvini play King 
Lear. Every one had seen Salvini play Othello, his 
most usual Shakespearean part ; but this performance 
of Lear was new to us all. It turned out to be over- 
whelming, an absolute, ideal incarnation of ruined 
age and outcast greatness and shattered reason and 
unchilded fatherhood and fallen majesty in despair. 
Browning sat there between us, his face set firm and 
white like marble, but before the end tears were coursing 
down it quite unchecked. He seemed unconscious 
of them, and as we came out could only murmur with 
a kind of awe, " It makes one wonder which is the 
greater, the poet or the actor." 

Shall I by way of contrast allow myself to recall 
another scene which is scarce less freshly present to 



ROBERT BROWNING 85 

me, and which illustrates the opposite scale of the 
poet's being, his partiality for any kind of fun or 
foolery of which the notion tickled him ? In the 
later seventies he was several times a visitor at Trinity 
College, Cambridge ; usually as the guest of the 
Master, Dr. Montagu Butler, once, at least, as mine. I 
asked a party of undergraduates to meet him at break- 
fast, and he charmed them by his geniality and rich 
talk, some of it as serious and high-pitched as the 
most earnest of his admirers could desire. By-and- 
by there came up the subject of Christian names and 
their abbreviations, and Browning began telling us 
how there once came three brothers to be matriculated 
together at an American University. The registrar 
asked the first brother his name. " Sam," answered 
the lad. " That is no name," declared the don 
with severity, " give me your full name properly." 
" Samuel, sir," came the reply. To a like question 
the next brother answered " My name is Lem, sir." 
"Nonsense," cried the registrar, this time angrily; 
" say your real name in full." " Lemuel, sir," faltered 
the culprit. The third brother, being roughly asked 
the same question, lost his head and twittered : 
" Jimuel, sir." I am sure the story ought to end here, 
but in sheer high spirits, and to keep up the laugh 
among the lads round the table, the poet went on to 
add a climax. The oflicial, he said, thereupon broke 
into fury, declared the answers had been a plot to 
insult him, and insisted on knowing which of the 
brothers had set the others on ; whereat they gasped 
in chorus, each pointing tremblingly at the other, 



86 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

" himuel, sir." Is the little tale, I wonder, one fresh 
to American readers, or stale ? If stale, I hope that, 
considering from whose mouth I heard it, they will 
pardon me for here repeating it. 

In thinking of this poet as he lived and moved, 
there is one quality he had which thrusts itself inevit- 
ably first upon one's mind, and that is cordiality. 
Cordial in his thoughts and feelings — unless he had 
the most cogent grounds to the contrary — cordial 
in his ways and words, that is what he was above all 
things, and with a cordiality open and undisguised, 
even demonstrative beyond what is usual in the inter- 
course of Englishmen, but at the same time free from 
any possible suspicion of insincerity. The same quality 
was conspicuous in his correspondence. I have by 
me dozens of letters or rather notes from him, proposals 
for appointments or answers to invitations, and in 
them all this is the one predominant tone. Among 
the rest I find two or three which are real, though 
brief enough, letters, and being unprinted may perhaps 
interest the reader. When his translation of the 
Agamemnon of iEschylus appeared in 1877, 1 protested, 
publicly if I remember aright and at any rate in private, 
against what I held to be its uncouthly, impermissibly, 
un-Englishly strained and crabbed literalness. " My 
dear Colvin," answers the poet, " I am probably 
more of your mind than you suppose, about the sort 
of translation I should like for myself and for you: 
but I only undertook to " transcribe " — esteeming it 
sufficient success if I put anybody ignorant of Greek 
in something like the position of one acquainted with it. 



ROBERT BROWNING 87 

This latter person recognizes under a given word the 
corresponding modern sense ; but he sees the — perhaps 
grotesque — word first, and supplies the elucidation 
himself: so I expect an intelligent reader to do, 
because it seems part of my business to instruct him 
that, for instance, the Greeks called TrpdinSes what 
we call ' understanding.' But it is ungracious work 
and I have done with it." A similar defence of his 
treatment is worked out more fully in the preface ; 
but looking back to-day at the matter of our discussion, 
I find that in point of fact to make head or tail of 
Browning's version I have to help myself by the 
Greek text as being much the more perspicuous of 
the two, and am more than ever convinced that, for 
me at all events, just as Rossetti's Early Italian Poets 
is the best of all verse translations, Browning's Agamem- 
non is the worst and most perverse. Fortunately he 
kept to his purpose declared in the words last quoted, 
and printed no more translations from the Greek. 

Concerning the next letter, I hardly know what 
can have been the " parcel " to which it refers, unless 
it were the printed proofs of some lectures which I 
had lately given in London, and which the poet had 
done me the honour to attend, on the Amazons, 
especially the story of Achilles and Penthesilea, as 
figured in Greek literature and art. The couplet 
quoted is of course from Hudibras : — 

" 19, Warwick Crescent, W. 

"April 23, '81. 
" My dear Colvtnt, — 

" I blame myself seriously for not having apprised you at once 
that your parcel had arrived duly and safely ; I hardly know, 



88 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

indeed, how I omitted doing so : your letter, which was followed 
immediately by the papers it promised, — and the notion that 
yourself would not be long behind — these, I suppose, made me 
forgetful of a plain duty, — which I shall not neglect on any future 
occasion. Thank you for all favours, including the pardon which 
I hope this apology will procure. 

" I find that my assiduity in attending your Lectures has induced 
somebody to believe the seed sown must needs bear fruit : and 
so I figure in the American Journals as ' having a poem in the 
press on the subject of Achilles and Penthesilea.' There are less 
suggestive subjects, — and I wish that it could be truly said of me 
— as by Butler of his heroine — 

' He laid about their heads as busily 
As th' Amazonian Dame Penthesily ' 
— if I quote correctly — which I doubt. With no doubt at all, my 
dear Colvin, I am ever 

"Yours cordially, 

" Robert Browning." 

The last, although modesty should perhaps prevent 
my printing it, is the most interesting, as showing 
what kind help I had from the master in preparing 
my volume on Walter Savage Landor for the English 
Men of Letters series, and as summing up the character 
of his old friend for good and all in a single salvo of 
adjectives : — 

" 19, Warwick Crescent, W. 

" July 12, '81. 
" My dear Colvin, — 

" The remaining ' proofs ' were duly sent me — and I was able 
to observe how completely you had set the insignificant matters 
right which were not altogether so before — in the last part, I mean. 
I have not received the Book itself and though I should be very 
grateful for it, and all connected with it, I hardly hoped to see my 
dear provoking admirable unwise learned childish friend put in 



ROBERT BROWNING 89 

just the light which lets all the facets of the jewel do justice to the 
diamond they diversify. I have heard only one opinion of the 
exceeding merit of the work. I say this, to dispense you from any 
suspicion that you are burthened with anything like " gratitude " 
to me— who am the grateful person under the circumstances — 
such duties as mine ought to be ordinary with ' friends and fellow 
students.' 

" You must be having wonderful weather where you are : here 
the heat and glare (not to blaspheme) are extraordinary. 

" Ever truly yours, 

" Robert Browning." 

Any last word in memory of this great poet and 
many-sided, intensely human spirit should touch on 
two of his most conspicuous and lovable virtues, which 
I had ample opportunity of observing ; his admirable 
constancy to old friends and assiduous attention to 
them in their declining years, as evidenced, for instance, 
by his relations with Mrs. Procter, the cynically witty, 
long-enduring, old-age-defying widow of the poet 
Barry Cornwall ; and his intense paternal devotion to 
his only son. When this adored " Pen " — for so by 
his pet name he was always called — this child of two 
mutually devoted parents of genius, had grown to 
manhood and began to show a certain talent, or at 
least a certain facility, in the twin arts of sculpture 
and painting, the eager, deferential solicitude with 
which his famous father would seek the opinions on 
the young man's work of those who were supposed to 
have some intelligence of such matters was a thing 
infinitely, and considering the mediocrity of the result, 
almost tragically, touching. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PRIORY AND GEORGE ELIOT 

From the later sixties down to the mid seventies 
of the last century, there were for some of us in London 
two specially attractive resorts for Sunday afternoons. 
These were The Priory and Little Holland House. 
The kinds of interest the two houses severally offered 
differed greatly, the only point in common between 
them being that both were homes of genius. The 
Priory was a commonplace detached villa in a fair- 
sized garden plot in St. John's Wood, the home of 
George Eliot and G. H. Lewes. Little Holland House 
in Kensington, a rambling old-fashioned abode in a 
beautiful well-timbered garden, had originally been a 
dower-house adjunct to and dependent on the great 
Holland House and its park ; in the years of which I 
speak it was the joint home of the painter George 
Frederic Watts and the old friends, the Thoby 
Prinseps, with whom he was domesticated. 

The Priory 
The Sunday afternoon receptions at The Priory were 
not always quite free from stiffness, the presiding 
genius allowing herself — so at least some of us thought 
— to be treated a little too markedly and formally as 
such. Perhaps, however, the secret was that she by 
nature lacked the lightness of human touch by which 

90 



THE PRIORY AND GEORGE ELIOT 91 

a hostess can diffuse among a mixed company of guests 
an atmosphere of social ease. Humour in abundance 
she had, but not of the light, glancing kind : it was a 
rich, deliberate humour springing from deep sources and 
corresponding with the general depth and power of her 
being. The signs of such depth and power were 
strongly impressed upon her countenance. I have 
known scarce any one in life whose looks in their own 
way more strongly drew and held one. She had of 
course no regular beauty (who was it that asked the 
question, " Have you seen a horse, sir ? Then you 
have seen George Eliot " ?) : but the expression of 
her long, strong, deeply ploughed features, was one 
not only of habitual brooding thought and intellectual 
travail but of intense and yearning human sympathy 
and tenderness. There could hardly be a truer record 
of her looks than that conveyed in the well-known etch- 
ing by Raj on after the life-sized drawing by F. W. 
Burton. If it had been her nature to seek equality 
of regard and companionship from those visitors who 
came about her, Lewes, I think, would have hardly 
made it possible. His own attitude was always that 
of the tenderest, most solicitous adoration ; and 
adoration, homage, was what he seemed to expect for 
her from all who came about them. He never encour- 
aged the conversation among the Sunday guests in the 
room to become equal or general, or allowed one of 
them to absorb her attention for very long, but would 
bring up one after another to have his or her share of 
it in turn, so that if any of us began to feel that talk 
with her was taking an easier and closer turn than usual, 



92 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

the next thing was that it was sure to be interrupted. 
I recall the beginnings of several conversations which 
were thus broken before I had succeeded in getting 
more from her than sympathetic enquiries about my 
own work and studies, or perhaps about the places I 
had last been visiting in France or Italy. Naturally 
I valued such enquiries, but was not at all seeking 
them : what I wanted was not to be drawn out myself 
but to draw out my hostess and feel her powers playing 
— the spell of her mind and character acting — upon me 
and upon the company generally. 

Lewes, when he had cut into the talk and carried 
one off as I have said, would entertain one genially 
and kindly in his own way in another part of the room, 
among some group of guests either fresh from or await- 
ing similar treatment. If George Eliot's countenance 
was of the equine type, his was not less distinctly of the 
simian, but having its ugliness redeemed by winning 
smiles both of humour and affection. Besides enter- 
taining the day's guests, or helping them to entertain 
each other, in groups, Lewes liked sometimes to get 
a few minutes' chat apart with a single one coming 
or going ; but the subject was almost always con- 
nected in some way with George Eliot's work and fame. 
During the serial publication of Middlemarch I parti- 
cularly remember his taking me apart one day as I 
came in, and holding me by the button as he announced 
to me in confidence concerning one of its chief charac- 
ters, " Celia is going to have a baby ! " This with an 
air at once gratified and mysterious, like that of some 
female gossip of a young bride in real life. 



CHAPTER Vn 

LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. F. WATTS 

At Little Holland House, where Watts lived during 
these same years, the atmosphere, although an atmo- 
sphere of genius, was of a totally different kind. The 
Thoby Prinseps, his permanent hosts, or rather house- 
mates, were people of marked characters and inter- 
esting associations of their own. Prinsep, by this 
time advanced in years, had been a distinguished Indian 
civil servant and one of the earliest members of the 
new Indian Council created after the mutiny, when 
the government of the dependency was taken out of 
the hands of the old East India Company. He was 
a man of attractive and imposing presence even after 
infirmity had compelled him to use a wheeled-chair 
for movement in his garden and deafness had made 
talk with him difficult. His wife was one of the seven 
daughters of James Pattle of the Indian Civil Service, 
all remarkable women and several of them famous in 
their day. The most beautiful of the sisters was 
Virginia, Countess Somers. The most original in gift 
and achievement was Julia, Mrs. Cameron. A close 
and hearty friend of half the most distinguished men 
of her time, she had in what were relatively the early 
days of photography made for the purposes of por- 

93 



94 MEMOKIES AND NOTES 

traiture almost an original art of it, such were the 
personal power and such the devices of lighting and 
focusing by which she imposed upon her sitters the 
characters and aspects she divined as most vitally and 
significantly theirs. With her untidy wisps of grizzling 
hair and her fingers stained brown with photographic 
chemicals, this lady presented nothing very attractive 
to the eye, but her resources of mind and character made 
themselves felt not less strikingly in her talk than in 
her work. Without the originality of Mrs. Cameron 
or the beauty of Lady Somers and some of the other 
sisters (one of whom was by marriage an aunt of my 
own), Mrs. Prinsep possessed faculties as personal 
and notable as any of them. Circumstance and 
opportunity led her to employ the genial richness and 
heartiness of her nature chiefly in playing the part 
of hostess. For some years before I was grown up 
and going about in the world, the Sunday afternoon 
gatherings at Little Holland House had already become 
a feature in London life. Not only artists, but men 
of letters, statesmen, politicians, travellers, were all 
to be met there, and all in the temper to enjoy and 
admire : no atmosphere could be more unlike that of 
one of the season's outdoor or indoor crushes, at which 
a crowd assembles to jostle and swelter as a matter 
of fashion or social obligation. 

It was understood that the main attraction at these 
receptions, over and above the half rural pleasantness 
of the scene and the hospitality of the atmosphere, 
was the fame and personality of the great artist Watts. 
It has always seemed to me a note to the social credit 



LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. F. WATTS 95 

of that day that a man of Watts' s undistinguished 
origin, (his father had been an unsuccessful musical 
instrument-maker,) and of his extreme and perfectly 
unaffected modesty and simplicity of character, should 
have been honoured and sought after as he was. It 
is true that both in looks and bearing he had a natural 
distinction which must always and in any company 
have been noticeable. Middle-sized and slightly 
stooping, he had finely chiselled features and brown 
eyes of a fine pensive expression, with hair and beard 
which his friends saw slowly changing through the years 
from rich brown to a grey that was almost white. 
There was about him a total lack of, and indeed 
incapacity for, any manner of pose or pretension. By 
lack of pretension must by no means be understood lack 
of ambition. His ambition, which was not at all for 
himself but singly and entirely for his art, was indeed 
a very part of his simplicity. Of the functions of art 
in the life of a community no man has ever held a more 
exalted conception. He was continually expending 
his energies and his influence, sometimes successfully, 
more often in vain, in the endeavour to be allowed to 
decorate the wall-spaces of public buildings with monu- 
mental compositions of high moral, historical, or allegor- 
ical significance. Alike by natural instinct and by 
strenuous technical study and experiment he was 
qualified, as very few artists in England have been, 
as a painter on a monumental scale or decorator of 
great wall-spaces. And fortunate it was that he was 
so qualified, seeing that the interest paramount in his 
own mind in undertaking such work was never the 



96 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

truly and singly artistic, it was always the moral and 
didactic interest. But he could not help being a fine 
designer and born decorator, as it were in spite of him- 
self. His passion for allegoric and didactic painting 
made him unjust to and even contemptuous of his 
own powers in that other branch of art — portraiture 
to wit — by which he was compelled to live. Fine 
and dignified as are the few monumental schemes 
which he was given opportunity to carry out, beauti- 
ful in the qualities of painting proper as are many of 
his moral and allegoric compositions on a smaller scale, 
posterity is unlikely to regret that the conditions of the 
time made portrait-painting his chief resource and 
means of livelihood. There was plenty of vulgarity 
in the Victorian age, but in Watts' s record of that age 
there is no breath or taint or shadow of it. This is 
not due to any fudging or insincerity in the artist, but 
partly to the fact that among his sitters were few 
save the very pick of contemporary men and women ; 
partly to those qualities in his own eye and hand which 
could not but discern and instinctively reproduce 
whatever in the types and characters of nineteenth- 
century England was akin to those of the sixteenth- 
century Venice which seemed as if it had been his 
spiritual birth-place. 

It was a sad and heartfelt loss to many of us when 
about 1875, the painter being then a little short of his 
sixty-eighth year, the loved and familiar scene of his 
activity was broken up. The ground on which the old 
Little Holland House and its outbuildings and gardens 
had stood was sold, and Watts had to create a new 



LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. F. WATTS 97 

home for himself. After an interval spent chiefly in 
the Isle of Wight, he built, as is well known, a new 
Little Holland House in Melbury Road on a corner of 
the ground which had been occupied by the old. But 
this was a Little Holland House, so far as its external 
aspects and surroundings were concerned, only in 
name. The fine genius who dwelt in it was of course 
quite unchanged : his beautiful simplicities of character 
did but increase with age, his high ambitions both in 
decorative painting and monumental sculpture con- 
tinued with increase rather than abatement : by and by 
there came into his life the new happiness of a wife 
who proved faultlessly tactful in sympathy and wise 
in tendence ; and those of us who had loved and 
honoured the master in those earlier years had the joy 
of seeing him live on to a patriarchal age with increase 
rather than diminution of universal regard. In these 
later years he spent the winters, and towards the end 
the whole of his time, at anew home, " Limnerslease," 
which he had built for himself on the Hog's Back, near 
Guildford, and where a pick of his works is now set out 
permanently on public exhibition. But for the pur- 
pose of these present reminiscences it is naturally the 
earlier years, and the special romance and charm 
and impressiveness of the earlier, now long van- 
ished surroundings, that rise up and insist on being 
recalled, however briefly. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Readers and lovers of Stevenson, in my experience, 
are generally to be divided into two sorts or classes. 
One sort care most for his stories, delighting in the 
humorous or tragic vitality of his characters and the 
thrill of the situations in which he puts them. The 
other sort are more interested in the man himself, and 
prefer the essays and letters, the books of travel and 
reminiscence in which he takes you into his own 
company and confidence. Readers of this latter class 
would rather paddle with Stevenson in his canoe down 
the Sambre and Oise, look out with him from the tower 
of Noyon Cathedral, or join in his farewell greetings to 
the three Graces of Origny — they would rather sleep 
under the stars with him and the she-ass Modestine 
in the woods of Gevaudan, or hear him moralize on 
the life of the Trappist monks in the convent of Our 
Lady of the Snows — than they would crouch in the 
apple-barrel with Jim Hawkins on board the Hispaniola 
and overhear the plotting of the mutineers, or lie sick 
with David Balfour in the house of Robin Oig while 
the host and Alan Breck challenge each other to their 
match upon the pipes. It pleases such readers better 

98 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 99 

to learn from Stevenson in the first person how his 
Brownies, as he calls them, furnished to him in dreams 
the most shudderful incidents in the parable of Jekyll 
and Hyde than to read these incidents themselves in 
the pages of the book. The fortunes of Prince Otto 
and Seraphina and Gondremark and Countess von 
Rosen interest them, it may be, less in the tale itself 
than in the letters in which Stevenson tells his corres- 
pondents of his delighted toil over the tale and of the 
high hopes that he has built upon it. They may be 
less moved — though that I find it hard to conceive — 
by the scene of the torn hymn-book and the birth of 
passion between Archie Weir and Kirstie Eliot in the 
little Pentland church than by the note of acute 
personal emotion which a thought of the same 
church arouses in Stevenson writing to a friend 
from exile. 

My own view is that both sides of him — the creative 
artist and the human personality — are interesting and 
admirable alike. But what I am now about to write 
will concern the man himself rather than any phase 
of his work. I shall dip a random bucket into the well 
of memory, and try whether the yield, from our four- 
teen years of close intimacy, may be such as to supple- 
ment and complete to any purpose the image which 
readers may otherwise have formed of him. And 
first, to wipe away some false impressions which seem 
to be current : — I lately found one writer, because 
Stevenson was thin, speaking of him as having been 
a " shadowy " figure ; another, because he was an 
invalid, describing him as " anaemic," and a third as 



100 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

" thin-blooded." Shadowy ! he was indeed all his 
life a bag of bones, a very lath for leanness ; as lean 
as Shakespeare's Master Slender, or let us say as 
Don Quixote. Nevertheless when he was in the room 
it was the other people, and not he, who seemed the 
shadows. The most robust of ordinary men seemed 
to turn dim and null in presence of the vitality that 
glowed in the steadfast, penetrating fire of the lean 
man's eyes, the rich, compelling charm of his smile, 
the lissom swiftness of his movements and lively 
expressiveness of his gestures, above all in the irresist- 
ible sympathetic play and abundance of his talk. 
Anaemic ! thin-blooded ! the main physical fact about 
him, according to those of his doctors whom I have 
questioned, was that his heart was too big and its 
blood supply too full for his body. There was failure of 
nutrition, in the sense that he could never make flesh ; 
there was weakness of the throat and lungs, weakness 
above all of the arteries, never of the heart itself; 
nor did his looks, even in mortal illness and exhaustion, 
ever give the impression of bloodlessness. More than 
one of his early friends, in describing him as habitually 
pale, have let their memory be betrayed by knowledge 
of what might have been expected in one so frail in 
health. To add, as some have done, that his hair was 
black is to misdescribe him still farther. As a matter 
of fact his face, forehead and all, was throughout the 
years when I knew him of an even, rather high, colour 
varying little whether he was ill or well ; and 
his hair, of a lightish brown in youth, although the 
brown grew darker with years, and darker still, I 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 101 

believe, in the tropics, can never have approached 
black. 

If you want to realize the kind of effect he made, at 
least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine 
this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital 
presence, with something about it that at first struck 
you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and 
unearthly, a sprite, an Ariel. And imagine that, as 
you got to know him, this sprite, this visitant from 
another sphere, turned out to differ from mankind in 
general not by being less human but by being a great 
deal more human than they ; richer-blooded, greater- 
hearted ; more human in all senses of the word, for he 
comprised within himself, and would flash on you in the 
course of a single afternoon, all the different ages and 
half the different characters of man, the unfaded fresh- 
ness of a child, the ardent outlook and adventurous 
day-dreams of a boy, the steadfast courage of manhood, 
the quick sympathetic tenderness of a woman, and 
already, as early as the mid- twenties of his life, an almost 
uncanny share of the ripe life-wisdom of old age. He 
was a fellow of infinite and unrestrained jest and yet 
of infinite earnest, the one very often a mask for the 
other ; a poet, an artist, an adventurer ; a man beset 
with fleshly frailties, and despite his infirm health of 
strong appetities and unchecked curiosities ; and yet 
a profoundly sincere moralist and preacher and son 
of the Covenanters after his fashion, deeply conscious 
of the war within his members, and deeply bent on 
acting up to the best he knew. Henley tried to sum 
him up in a well-known sonnet : — 



102 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

"Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, 
Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, 
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity — 
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
Of passion and impudence and energy. 
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : 
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
Much Anthony, of Hamlet most of all, 
And something of the Shorter-Catechist." 

In that sonnet Henley has drawn up a lively and 
showy — or shall we not rather say flashy ? — enough 
catalogue of the diverse qualities and contradictory 
aspects which he recognized in his friend. But the 
pity is that as there described those qualities lie like 
spillikins, unrelated and disconnected. Henley has 
missed what gave its unity to the character and what 
every other among his nearer friends soon discovered 
to be the one essential, never failing and ever endearing 
thing under all that play and diversity of being. This 
was the infinitely kind and tender, devotedly generous, 
brave and loving heart of the man. 

I first saw him at the beginning of August, 1873, 
that is all but forty-eight years ago, when he was 
twenty-three and I twenty-eight. I had landed from 
a Great-Eastern train at a little country station in 
Suffolk, and was met on the platform by a stripling 
in a velvet jacket and straw hat, who walked up 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 103 

with me to the country rectory where he was staying 
and where I had come to stay. I had lately been 
appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge ; the rectory 
was that of Cockfield, near Bury St. Edmunds ; the 
host was my much older colleague Professor Churchill 
Babington, of amiable and learned memory ; the 
hostess was his wife, a grand-daughter of the Rev. 
Lewis Balfour of Colinton, Midlothian ; the youth was 
her young first cousin by the mother's side, Louis 
Stevenson from Edinburgh. The first shyness over 
I realized in the course of that short walk how well I 
had done to follow the advice of a fellow-guest who 
had preceded me in the house — to wit Mrs. Sitwell, 
my wife as she came later on to be. She had written 
to me about this youth, declaring that I should find 
him a real young genius and urging me to come if I 
could before he went away. I could not wonder at 
what I presently learnt — how within an hour of his 
first appearance at the rectory, knapsack on back, a 
few days earlier, he had captivated the whole house- 
hold. To his cousin the hostess, a woman of a fine 
sympathetic nature and quick, humorous intelligence, 
he was of course well kncwn beforehand, though she 
had never seen him in so charming a light as now. 
With her husband the Professor, a clergyman of solid 
antiquarian and ecclesiastical knowledge and an almost 
Pickwickian simplicity of character corresponding to 
his lovable rotund visage and innocently beaming 
spectacles — with the Professor, " Stiwy," as he called 
his wife's young cousin, was already something of a 
favourite. Of their guests, I found one, a boy of ten, 



104 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

watching for every moment when he could monopolize 
the newcomer's attention, either to show off to him the 
scenes of his toy theatre or to conduct him confiden- 
tially by the hand about the garden or beside the moat ; 
while between him and the boy's mother, Mrs. Sitwell, 
there had sprung up an instantaneous understanding. 
Not only the lights and brilliancies of his nature, but 
the strengths and glooms that underlay them, were 
from the first apparent to her, so that in the trying 
season of his life which followed he was moved to 
throw himself upon her sympathies with the unlimited 
confidence and devotion to which his letters of the 
time bear witness. He sped those summer nights and 
days for us all as I have scarce known any sped before 
or since. He seemed, this youngster, already to have 
lived and seen and felt and dreamed and laughed and 
longed more than others do in a lifetime. He showed 
himself moreover full of reading, at least in English 
and French — for his Latin was shaky and Greek he 
only got at through translations. Over wide ranges 
of life and letters his mind and speech ran like the 
fingers of a musician over the keyboard of an instru- 
ment. Pure poetic eloquence (coloured always, be it 
remembered, by a strong Scottish accent), grave argu- 
ment and criticism, riotous freaks of fancy, flashes of 
nonsense more illuminating * than wisdom, streamed 
from him inexhaustibly as he kindled with delight at 
the delight of his hearers. 

Strange to say, this brilliant creature, though he had 
made one or two close and appreciative intimates of 
his own age and sex, had not been thought good 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 105 

enough for the polite society of his native Edinburgh. 
In most of the few houses which he frequented he seems 
to have been taken for an eccentric and affected kind 
of Bohemian poseur, to be treated at best with tolera- 
tion. In a book, or if I remember rightly in more 
than one book, on his early Edinburgh days, a member 
of one of those houses, and sister of one of his special 
friends, has since his death written of him in a fine 
superior tone of retrospective condescension. In new 
and more sympathetic company his social genius 
immediately expanded and glowed as I have said, 
till all of us seemed to catch something of his own 
gift and inspiration. This power of inspiring others 
has been noted by many of those who knew Stevenson 
later as an especial and distinguishing mark of his 
conversation. As long as he was there you kept 
discovering with delight unexpected powers in your- 
self. You felt as if you had taken service with a 
conjuror, whom you supplied with balls of clay and 
who took them and turned them into gold and sent 
them whirling and glowing about his head, making you 
believe all the while that they were still truly yours. 

But on further acquaintance it soon became clear 
that under all this captivating, this contagious gaiety 
and charm there lay a troubled spirit, in grave risk 
from the perils of youth, from a constitution naturally 
frail and already heavily over-strained, from self- 
distrust and uncertainty as to his own powers and 
purposes, and above all from the misery of bitter, heart- 
and soul-rending disagreements with a father to whom 
he was devotedly attached. It was only when, after 



106 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

a brief return to Edinburgh from Cockfield, he came 
south again in the next month that we discovered so 
much concerning him. He spent his time partly in 
London and partly with me in a cottage I then in- 
habited in the southern hill-suburb of Norwood. With 
various types of genius and of the charm and power of 
genius among my elders I had already, as indicated 
in some of the earlier pages of this book, had fortunate 
opportunities of becoming familiar. In this brilliant 
and troubled Scotch youth I could not fail to realize 
that here, among my juniors, was a genius who might 
well fail on the threshold of life, but who, if he could 
only win through, had it in him to take as shining a 
place as any of them. No wonder if we, his new 
friends, were keen to do all we could for him in the way 
of help and sympathy. It was no surprise to us 
when towards mid-October, after a second return to 
Edinburgh, his letters brought news of threatening ill- 
ness, nor when, having again come south to be exam- 
ined, as had been agreed with his father, for admis- 
sion into one of the London Inns of Court, he had per- 
force to change his purpose and undergo a different 
kind of examination at the hands of Sir Andrew Clark. 
That wise physician peremptorily ordered him a 
period of rest in the soothing climate of the French 
Riviera, out of reach of all occasion or possibility of 
contention with those he loved at home. 

The recollections of him that remain with me from 
the next few years are partly of two visits I paid him 
in the course of that first winter (1873-1874) on the 
Riviera ; partly of visits he paid me in the Norwood 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 107 

cottage, or in another cottage I rented a little later 
at Hampstead, or later again in college rooms which 
I occupied as a professor at Cambridge ; partly from 
his various descents upon or passages through London, 
made sometimes from Edinburgh and sometimes from 
France, after his return in 1874 to his now reconciled 
home. The points in his character these stray 
recollections chiefly illustrate are, first, the longing 
for a life of action and adventure, which in an ordinary 
youth might have passed as a matter of course but 
in one already so stricken in health seemed pathetically 
vain ; next, his inborn faculty — a very much rarer 
gift — as an artist in letters, and the scrupulous self- 
training by which almost from boyhood he had been 
privately disciplining it : then the intensely, quite 
exceptionally, observing and loving interest he took 
in young children : and above all, that magical power 
he had of winning the delighted affection, the immediate 
confidence, of men and women of the most various 
sorts and conditions, always excepting those hide- 
bound in starched propriety or conventional official- 
dom, whom he had a scarce less unfailing power of 
putting against him at first sight. 

At the Suffolk rectory he had been neatly enough 
clad : most of the images of him that rise next before 
me present him in the slovenly, nondescript Bohemian 
garments and untrimmed hair which it was in those 
days his custom to wear. I could somehow never feel 
this to be an affectation in Stevenson, or dislike it as 
I should have been apt to dislike and perhaps despise 
it in anybody else. We agree to give the name of affec- 



108 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

tation to anything markedly different from common 
usage in little, every-day outward things — unconcerning 
things, as the poet Donne calls them. But affectation 
is affectation indeed only when a person does or says that 
which is false to his or her nature. And given a nature 
differing sufficiently from the average, perhaps the 
real affectation would be that it should force itself to 
preserve an average outside to the world. Steven- 
son's uncut hair came originally from the fear of 
catching cold. His shabby clothes came partly from 
lack of cash, partly from lack of care, partly, as I 
think I have said elsewhere, from a hankering after 
social experiment and adventure, and a dislike of being 
identified with any special class or caste. Certainly 
conventional and respectable attire, when by exception 
he wore it, did not in those days sit him well. Going 
with me one day from Hampstead to the Royal 
Academy Exhibition, he thought such attire would be 
expected of him, and looked out a black frock coat and 
tall hat which he had once worn at a wedding. I can 
see now the odd figure he made as he walked with me 
in that unwonted garb down Regent Street and along 
Piccadilly. True, he carried his tall hat not on his 
head, but in his hand because it chafed him. Also, 
being fresh from an enthusiastic study of the prosody 
of Milton, he kept declaiming to me with rapturous 
comments as we walked the lines and cadences which 
chiefly haunted him : — 

" His wrath 
Burned after them to the bottomless pit." 
"Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved — " 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 109 

"All night the dreadless angel, unpursued — " 
" Oh ! how comely it is and how reviving 
To the spirits of just men long opprest ! " 

It was while he declaimed these last two lines, the 
opening of a famous chorus in Samson Agonistes, that 
the gates of Burlington House, I remember, enfolded 
us. 

More characteristic of his ordinary ways was his 
appearance one very early morning from London at 
the Norwood cottage. He presented himself to my 
astonished servant, on her opening the shutters, 
wearing a worn-out sleeved waistcoat over a black 
flannel shirt, and weary and dirty from a night's walking 
followed by a couple of hours' slumber in a garden 
outhouse he had found open. He had spent the night 
on the pad through the southern slums and suburbs, 
trying to arouse the suspicions of one policeman after 
another till he should succeed in getting taken up as 
a rogue and vagabond and thereby gaining proof 
for his fixed belief that justice, at least in the hands 
of its subordinate officers, has one pair of scales for 
the ragged and another for the respectable. But one 
and all saw through him, and refused to take him 
seriously as a member of the criminal classes. Though 
surprised at their penetration, and rather crestfallen 
at the failure of his attempt, he had had his reward 
in a number of friendly and entertaining conversations 
with the members of the force, ending generally in 
confidential disclosures as to their private affairs and 
feelings. 

Foreign officials and police, not to speak of attaches 



110 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and bank clerks and managers, were not so clear-sighted, 
and he sometimes came in for worse treatment than 
he bargained for. Readers remember, I dare say, his 
account of his expulsion by the hostess of La Fere in 
the Inland Voyage, still more that of his arrest and 
temporary imprisonment by the Commissary of Police 
at Chatillon-sur-Loing, which is one of the most 
delectable pieces of humorous narrative in English 
literature. Troubles of this kind had their consolation 
in that they gave him matter for the entertainment of 
his readers. Not so the rebuffs he sometimes under- 
went when he visited embassies or banks on business, 
concerned with passports or letters of credit. I have 
known him made actually ill by futile anger at the 
contumelious reception he met with in such places. 
He lacked the power, which comes only too naturally 
from most men sprung, as he was, from a stock accus- 
tomed to command, of putting down insolence by 
greater insolence. He could rage, indeed, but usually 
his rage was ineffectual and only brought a dangerous 
rush of blood to his head and eyes. Once, however, 
he had his revenge and his hour of triumph, of which 
to my deep regret I was not myself a witness. On 
the way from Nice to Royat he had stopped at Cler- 
mont-Ferrand, the old provincial capital of Auvergne. 
He went to a bank to cash some circular notes of the 
British Linen Company in Edinburgh. His appear- 
ance had the usual, almost magical, effect of arousing 
in the business mind suspicions, amounting to conviction, 
of his dishonesty. The men in office roundly told 
him that there was no such firm among their corre- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 111 

spondents ; that they more than suspected him of 
having come with intent to defraud, but as an act 
of kindness would give him five minutes to make 
himself scarce before they sent for the police. For 
once he kept his head and temper, outwardly at least ; 
sturdily declined to leave the premises ; and insisted 
that the police should be sent for immediately. Pre- 
sently his eye was caught by a rack of pigeon-holes 
containing letters and documents which by some intui- 
tion he saw or divined to be from foreign correspondents 
of the firm ; dashed at it despite all remonstrances ; 
rummaged the papers before the eyes of the astonished 
clerks ; drew forth in triumph a bundle containing 
correspondence from the British Linen Company, 
including the letter of credit for himself ; demanded 
that the partners and men in authority should be 
brought down, and when they appeared, exposed to 
them with a torrent of scornful eloquence their mis- 
conduct of their business, and drew a terrifying picture 
of the ruin that they must inevitably reap from such 
treatment of distinguished foreign clients. His triumph 
was complete : the whole house, partners and clerks, 
abased themselves in regrets and apologies, and es- 
corted him to the door with fawning demonstrations 
of respect. This was his day of victory ; strages 
bankerorum he called it, and went off and at once 
designed a medal — never, I believe, executed — in its 
c ommemorat ion. 

But this story belongs to a later date ; and to go 
back to my own memories of the early days — I went 
twice to see him during that invalid winter on the 



112 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Riviera. He had been staying at Mentone (I should 
properly say Menton, but those of us who remember 
the place before the annexation of Savoy and Nice 
to France cannot bring ourselves to spell or pronounce 
it except in the more euphonious Italian manner). 
I proposed that he should move to meet me as far 
(some six miles) as Monaco ; the aspect of that tiny 
capital, with the exquisite capricious charm of its 
situation on a high peninsular rock between the harbour 
and the outer sea, having strongly caught my fancy 
as a boy in driving along the Corniche road with my 
father, and made me desire to explore it from within. 
There we accordingly spent four or five days, and 
then four or five more in one of the quieter hotels at 
Monte Carlo. My memories of the time have merged 
for the most part into a generalized impression of 
sunlit hours spent basking in a row-boat about the 
bay, and sped by endless talk which ran forward 
beyond the present days of illness to ardent schemes 
both of literature and adventure, the one as vividly 
imagined and worded as the other. Stevenson has 
brought home to the senses of his readers, by a magical 
phrase or two, the pungently delicious mingled scent 
of pine and juniper and myrtle and rosemary which 
in sunny weather comes wafted from the Cap Martin 
over the shoreward waters of that sea : he revelled 
in this scent, and I believe it was already carrying him 
in imagination on voyages to far-off spice-islands of 
the East. Of the literary projects broached between 
us the only one I remember was a spectacle-play on 
that transcendent type of human vanity, Herostratus, 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 113 

who to keep his name from being forgotten kindled 
the fire that burned down the temple of Ephesus. 
Psychology and scenic effects as Stevenson descanted 
on them come up together in my memory even yet, 
not in any exactness of detail, but only in a kind of 
vague dazzle and flamboyance. 

There was one sort of excitement and one form of 
risk which at no time had any lure for Louis and which 
he hated alike by instinct and principle, and that was 
gambling for money ; and into that famous and 
fascinating cosmopolitan hell, the Casino of Monte 
Carlo, he never entered. Once or twice I looked in 
by myself to watch the play ; and the last time, hearing 
a sudden sharp " ping " from near the wall of the 
room over my right shoulder, I turned and saw that 
a loser having left the table lay writhing on the floor. 
He had shot himself, fatally as I afterwards learnt, 
in the stomach. The attendants promptly came 
forward, lifted him on to an armchair, and carried 
him out of the room with an air of grave disapproval 
and shocked decorum. When I told Louis of the 
scene he took a disgust at the place, and we left it 
together for Mentone. After I had seen him installed 
in fresh and comfortable quarters in the Hotel Mirabeau, 
now defunct, at the eastern end of the town, I left for 
Paris, where I had a few weeks' work to do. Returning 
in January, I found him enjoying the company of 
two Russian sisters living in a villa annexed to the 
hotel, ladies some twenty years older than himself, 
to whom and to their children he had become quickly 
and warmly attached. I say their children, for we 



114 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

never could well make out which child belonged to 
which sister, or whether one of the two was not the 
mother of them both. Both were brilliantly accom- 
plished and cultivated women, one having all the 
unblushing outspokenness of her race, its unchecked 
vehemence and mutability in mirth and anger, in 
scorn, attachment, or aversion ; the other much of 
an invalid, consistently gentle and sympathetic, and 
withal an exquisite musician. For Stevenson this 
sister conceived a great quasi-maternal tenderness, 
and one of the odd tricks my memory has played me 
is that my nerves retain even now the sense of her 
sharp twitch of pain as I spoke one day, while she 
was walking with her arm in mine, of the fears enter- 
tained by his friends for his health and future. It 
was the younger of the two children who figures so 
much under her name Nelitchka in his letters of the 
time. Hardly any one has written of young children 
with such yearning inwardness of love combined with 
so much analytic intentness and subtlety of observation 
as he. But how, the reader may interrupt, how about 
the illustrious Victor Hugo with his L-Art d'etre 
grand-pere and his Les Enfants ? The comparison 
indeed sounds crushing ; but perhaps Hugo's work 
in this kind, full of genius as it is, full of insight 
and tenderness, would impress more if there were 
not so overwhelmingly much of it, if it did not burden 
us with a sense of almost mechanical abundance and 
redundance and iteration. The small objects of Steven- 
son's passionately delighted study were not always 
at first won or attracted by him. Rather they were 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 115 

apt to feel discomposed under the intensity of the 
beaming gaze he fastened upon them; and it was 
with a touch of womanly affront at feeling herself 
too hard stared at that the baby Nelitchka (aged 
two and a half) addressed him by a word for "rogue" 
or " naughty man " she had lately picked up in Italy, 
" Berecchino ! " Parental interposition presently 
reconciled her, and they became fast friends and play- 
mates ; but the name stuck, and for Nellie, throughout 
those weeks when the child's company and the watching 
of her indefatigable tottering efforts to dance, and 
dance, and dance to her mother's music were among 
his chief delights — for Nellie, Stevenson was never 
anything but Monsieur Berecchino. But of this more 
anon. 

Another memory of the time illustrates the hopeless 
incompatibility that existed between this young genius 
and the more frozen types of bourgeois convention- 
ality. There was at our hotel a young or youngish, 
well-groomed Frenchman of this class, the quintessence 
of respectable nullity and complacent correctness, 
who sat at the same long table with us for some weeks. 
At our end of the table, besides Stevenson and myself 
with the Russian ladies and their children, there sat 
also a bearded French landscape painter, Kobinet by 
name, in opinions a violent clerical and reactionary, 
but an artist and the best of genial good fellows. Day 
after day Stevenson kept this little company in an 
enchanted atmosphere of mirth and mutual delight 
with one another and with him. But the glow which 
enkindled the rest of us stopped dead short of the 



116 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

correct Frenchman, who sat a little apart, icily isolated, 
annoyed, envying, disapproving. Stevenson, I think, 
was hardly aware of his existence at all, more than 
of a wooden dummy. R. L. S. was drawing more or 
less consciously from himself when he wrote of one 
of his characters, Dick Naseby in The Story of a 
Lie — He was a type-hunter among mankind. He 
despised small game and insignificant personalities, 
whether in the shape of dukes or bagmen, letting them 
go by like seaweed ; but show him a refined or powerful 
face, let him hear a plangent or a penetrating voice, 
fish for him with a living look in some one's eye, a 
passionate gesture, a meaning or ambiguous smile, 
and his mind was instantaneously awakened. Finding 
himself thus left out in the cold, not rudely or on 
purpose, for Stevenson was incapable of a conscious 
rudeness, but nevertheless left out, from a company 
which included obviously attractive ladies, my French- 
man could not bear it. One day, on the occasion of 
some commonplace civility I showed him, he confided 
to me, with no breach of correct manners, the extreme 
distaste and resentment he had conceived against my 
friend, and even indicated that he would like to call 
him out if he could find an excuse. There was nothing 
to be done, no possible point of mutual contact or 
understanding between them. I could but affably 
suggest that he would be likely to find more sympathetic 
company at another hotel ; and he took the hint. 

The warm regard which sprang up in these Mentone 
days between Stevenson and those two Russian sisters 
led to a promise that in the next summer he should 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 117 

pay them a visit in their own country. But circum- 
stances made it impossible for him to fulfil the pro- 
mise ; the intimacy of those winter months on the 
Riviera had no sequel save a correspondence which 
flagged after a few months and by and by failed 
altogether ; and neither he nor I ever saw or heard 
of either sister again. 

To the same winter months on the French Riviera 
belongs the first meeting of Stevenson with another 
gifted Scotsman of letters, Andrew Lang, in those days 
also threatened with lung trouble, who became his 
friend and long outlived him. It seems indeed but 
the other day that we had to mourn the loss from 
among us of that kind, learned, whimsical, many- 
faceted character — scholar, critic, poet, journalist, 
f olk-lorist, humanist, and humorist ; and in the mind's 
eye of many of us there still lives freshly the aspect of 
the half-silvered hair setting off the all but black eye- 
brows and gipsy eyes ; of the chiselled features, the 
smiling languid face and grace behind which there 
lurked intellectual energies so keen and varied, accom- 
plishments so high, so insatiable a spirit of curiosity 
and research under a guise so airy and playful. A 
fault, or flaw, or perversity in Lang, no doubt, was the 
trick of flippancy which he allowed to spoil some of 
his work and which masked altogether from some 
eyes the fine substance and quality of the man. An- 
other was the habitual preoccupation with his own 
ideas which made his manner, to women especially, 
often seem careless and abstracted, or even rude, when 
rudeness was farthest from his intention. But towards 



118 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

his friends there was no man steadier in kindness or 
more generous in appreciation, as I for one can testify 
from more than forty years' experience, and as Steven- 
son had full occasion to know. It was not without 
some trepidation that I first brought them together 
in those Mentone days, for I suppose no two young 
Scots, especially no two sharing so many literary tastes, 
were ever more unlike by temperament and training. 
On the one hand the young Oxford don, a successful 
and typical scholar on the regular academic lines, 
picturesque by the gift of nature but fastidiously correct 
and reserved, purely English in speech, with a recurring 
falsetto note in the voice — that kind of falsetto that 
bespeaks languor rather than vehemence ; full of 
literature and pleasantry but on his guard, even to 
affectation, against any show of emotion, and consist- 
ently dissembling the perfervidum ingenium of his 
race, if he had it, under a cloak of indifference and 
light banter. On the other hand the brilliant, irregu- 
larly educated lad from Edinburgh, to the conventional 
eye an eccentrically ill-clad and long-haired nondescript, 
with the rich Lallan accent on his tongue, the obvious 
innate virility and spirit of adventure in him ever in 
mutiny against the invalid habits imposed by ill-health, 
the vivid, demonstrative ways, every impulse of his 
heart and mind flashing out in the play of eye, feature, 
and gesture no less than in the humorous riot and poeti- 
cal abundance of his talk. There were symptoms 
during, and even after, the first meeting of the two 
which seemed as though the kind of misunderstanding 
might spring up between them which I had feared; 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 119 

but such an immediate result having been happily 
averted they learned quickly to appreciate each other's 
gifts and company, and remained fast friends to the 
end. There are few finer tributes by one man of letters 
to another, his contemporary, than that of Lang to 
Stevenson in the introduction to the Swanston edition. 
After his return from the Riviera in 1874 Stevenson 
was elected to the Savile club, then quartered in the 
house in Savile Row from which it takes its name 
and which it afterwards outgrew. (It had pre- 
viously led for a few years a precarious kind of chrysalis 
existence, under the title of the New Club, in Spring 
Gardens off Charing Cross.) This little society had 
been founded on a principle aimed against the stand- 
offishness customary in English club life, and all 
members were expected to hold themselves predisposed 
to talk and liable to accost without introduction. 
Stevenson's earliest friends in the club besides myself 
were Fleeming Jenkin, the most versatile and vivacious, 
most pugnaciously minded and friendliest-hearted of 
men, the single one among his Edinburgh seniors and 
teachers who had seen what the lad was worth, truant 
pupil though he might be, and made a friend of him ; 
and my Cambridge contemporary, Professor W. K. 
Clifford, that short-lived genius unequalled and unap- 
proached, as those aver who can follow him, in the 
rarefied region of speculation where the higher mathe- 
matics and metaphysics merge into one. In spheres 
of thought and study more accessible to the rest of us, 
Clifford had a beautiful lucidity of mind and mastery 
of style, and in ordinary human intercourse was 



120 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

extremely striking and attractive, with his powerful 
head and blunt Socratic features, the candid, almost 
childlike, upcast look of his light grey-blue eyes between 
their dark lashes, the tripping and easy, again almost 
childlike, simplicity of speech and manner with which 
he would debate the profoundest problems, and the 
quite childlike pleasure he took in all manner of 
fun and nonsense and surprises and fairy-tales (I leave 
out his freaks of prowess and daring as an athlete and 
a dozen of his other claims to regard and admiration). 
That such a man, having met Stevenson once or twice 
in my company, should be keen to back him for the 
club was a matter of course. Nor did the members 
in general, being for the most part young men drawn 
from the professions of science or learning, of art, 
literature, journalism, or the stage, fail to appreciate 
the new-comer. On his visits to London he generally 
lunched there, and at the meal and afterwards came to 
be accepted and habitually surrounded as a radiating 
centre of good talk, a kind of ideal incarnation of the 
spirit of the society. Comparatively rare as they were, 
I believe that both his presences in those days and 
his tradition subsequently contributed as much as 
anything towards the success and prosperity of the 
club. Mr. Edmund Gosse, who joined us a couple of 
years later, has given a pleasantly vivid picture of the 
days when an introduction at the Savile, renewing the 
memory of a chance meeting on a Highland pleasure- 
steamer six years before, laid the foundations of his 
and Stevenson's friendship. One signal case of failure 
remains indeed in some of our memories. A certain 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 121 

newly elected member of some social and literary stand- 
ing, but unacquainted with the spirit of the place, sat 
lunching alone. Stevenson, desiring to welcome him 
and make him feel at home, went over and opened talk 
in his most gracious manner. His advance was received 
with a cold rebuff and the implied intimation that 
the stranger desired no company but his own. Steven- 
son came away furious, and presently relieved his 
wrath with the lampoon which is included in his pub- 
lished works and begins (the offender being made to 
speak in the first person) : — 

" I am a kind of farthing dip 
Unfriendly to the nose and eyes." 

But to turn from such social memories, which will 
be shared by a dwindling band of survivors from the 
middle and later seventies, to those private to myself : 
— it was in the early summer of 1874, soon after the 
appearance of his second published paper, Ordered 
South, that he spent a fortnight with me in my quarters 
on Hampstead Hill. One morning, while I was 
attending to my own affairs, I was aware of Stevenson 
craning intently out of a side window and watching 
something. Presently he turned with a radiant coun- 
tenance and the thrill of happiness in his voice to 
bid me come and watch too. A group of girl children 
were playing with the skipping-rope a few yards down 
the lane. " Was there ever such heavenly sport ? 
Had I ever seen anything so beautiful ? Kids and a 
skipping-rope — most of all that blessed youngest kid 
with the broken nose who didn't know how to skip 



122 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

— nothing in the whole wide world had ever made 
him half so happy in his life before." Scarce any one 
else would have given a second look or thought to 
the little scene ; but while it lasted it held him thus 
entranced in the eagerness of observation, and exclaim- 
ing through all the gamut of superlatives. From such 
superlatives, corresponding to the ardour and intensity 
of his being, his talk at all times derived much of its 
colour. During ill-health, had he a day or an hour 
of respite, he would gleefully proclaim himself a balmy 
being and a bird of Paradise. Did anything in life 
or literature please him, it was for the moment inimit- 
ably and incomparably the most splendid and wonder- 
ful thing in the whole world, and he must absolutely 
have you think so too — unless, indeed, you chose to 
direct his sense of humour against his own exaggera- 
tions, in which case he would generally receive your 
criticism with ready assenting laughter. But not 
quite always, if the current of feeling was too strong. 
My wife reminds me of an incident in point, from the 
youthful time when he used to make her the chief 
confidante of his troubles and touchstone of his tastes. 
One day he came to her with an early, I think the 
earliest, volume of poems by Mr. Robert Bridges, the 
present poet-laureate, in his hand ; declared here was 
the most wonderful new genius, and enthusiastically 
read out to her some of the contents in evidence ; till 
becoming aware that they were being coolly received, 
he leapt up crying, " My God ! I believe you don't 
like them," and flung the book across the room and 
himself out of the house in a paroxysm of disappoint- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 123 

ment — to return a few hours later and beg pardon 
humbly for his misbehaviour. But for some time 
afterwards, whenever he desired her judgment on 
work of his own or others, he would begin by bargain- 
ing : " You won't Bridges me this time, will you ? " 
Sometimes, indeed, when he meant something stronger 
even than usual, he would himself disarm the critic, 
and at the same time heighten his effect, by employing a 
figure not of exaggeration but of humorous diminution, 
and would cover the intensity of his feeling by express- 
ing it in some perfectly colourless, flat hack phrase. 
You would propose something you knew he was red- 
hot to do, and he would reply, his eyes flashing with 
anticipation, " Well, yes, he could bring himself to 
do that without a pang " : or he would describe the 
horrors of a visit to the dentist or of a formal tea-party 
(to one or two of which he was about this time lured), 
by admitting that it hadn't been quite all his fancy 
painted it ; which you knew meant a degree of tribula- 
tion beyond superlatives. 

Nothing proved to my mind Stevenson's true voca- 
tion to literature, or encouraged me more to push him 
under the notice of editors, than the way in which 
he exercised from the first a firm artistic control over 
his own temperament, suppressing his tendency to 
exaggerations and superlatives and practising a deliber- 
ate moderation of statement and lenity of style. This 
was very apparent when the little scene outside our 
lodging-house window, mingling in memory with the 
pleasure he had lately experienced at Mentone in 
watching the staggering evolutions of his Russian 



124 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

baby friend Nelitchka, suggested to him the essay, 
" Notes on the Movements of Young Children," which 
was printed in the Portfolio (then edited by Philip 
Gilbert Hamerton) for the following August. The 
little paper, which he did not think worth reprinting 
in his life-time but is to be found in the posthumous 
editions, seemed to me an extraordinarily promising 
effort at analytic description half-humorous, half- 
tender — and promising above all in as far as it proved 
how well, while finding brilliantly effective expression 
for the subtlety of vital observation which was one 
part of his birthright, he could hold in check the 
tendency to emotional stress and vehemence which 
was another. This was in itself a kind of distinction 
in an age when so many of our prose-writers, and those 
the most attractive and impressive to youth, as Carlyle, 
Macaulay, Ruskin, Dickens, were men who, for all 
their genius, lacked or did not seek the special virtues 
of restraint and lenity of style, but were given, each 
after his manner, to strenuous emphasis, to splendid 
over-colouring and over-heightening : dealers in the 
purple patch and the insistent phrase, the vehement 
and contentious assertion. 

The next scene which comes up with a special vivid- 
ness in my memory dates, I think, from a year or 
two later. Of very young children his love was not, 
as I have said, always at once returned by them ; 
but over growing boys of whatever class or breeding 
his spell was apt to be instantaneous. City arabs 
felt it just as much as any others. One day, as he 
and I had just come out from a meditative stroll 



KOBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 125 

through St. Paul's Cathedral, we found ourselves near 
a little ragged troop of such. With one of his char- 
acteristic smiles, full of love and mischief, he imme- 
diately, at a first glance, seemed to establish a roguish 
understanding with them. They grinned back and 
closed about him and clung to him as we walked, fasten- 
ing eager looks on his, held and drawn by they knew 
not what expectation : no, not by the hope of coppers, 
but by something more human — more divine, if you 
like to put it so — that had beamed upon their poor 
little souls from his looks. The small crowd of them 
kept growing and still surrounding us. As it was 
impossible for him at that place and moment practically 
to provide adventure or entertainment for them, it 
became a little difficult to know what to do. At last 
I solved the situation tamely, by calling a hansom 
cab and carrying my friend off in it. More by token, 
that same hansom horse, I remember, presently got 
the bit between his teeth and bolted for some half a 
mile along the Thames Embankment ; and while I 
sat with stiffened knees and nerves on the stretch, 
expecting a smash, I could see that Stevenson actually 
enjoyed it. Few of us, chiefly because the build of 
the vehicle kept the driver's hands and hold upon the 
reins out of sight, were ever truly happy in a bolting 
hansom ; but Stevenson was so made that any kind 
of danger was a positive physical exhilaration to him. 
Of the visits which he paid to me at Cambridge 
in these years, the retrospect has again generalized 
itself for the most part into vagueness, a mere abstract 
sense of forgotten talk ranging from the most red- 



126 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

blooded human to the airiest elfin. One impression 
which was always strong upon him there, and I think 
is recorded somewhere in his letters, is the profound 
difference between these English universities, with their 
beauty and dignity of aspect, their venerable college 
buildings and fair avenues and gardens, and anything 
which exists in Scotland, where residential colleges 
form no part of university life. Such surroundings 
used to affect him with a sense almost of unreality, 
as something romantically pleasurable but hardly 
credible ; and this sense came most strongly upon 
him when I left him alone for some days in occupation 
of my rooms, with gyps and porters at his beck, while 
I went off on business elsewhere. Of personal rela- 
tions which he formed there the only one I specially 
remember was with that interesting character, the 
late A. G. Dew-Smith. Dew-Smith, or Dew, as his 
friends called him for short, was a man of fine tastes 
and of means to gratify them. As a resident master of 
arts he helped the natural science departments by 
starting and superintending a workshop for manufac- 
turing instruments of research of the most perfect 
make and finish ; and he was one of the most skilful 
of photographers, alike in the scientific and artistic uses 
of the craft — a certain large-scale carbon print he took 
of Stevenson to my mind comes nearer to the original 
in richness of character and expression than any other 
portrait. He was a collector of rare prints and other 
treasures, including precious stones, of which in their 
uncut state he would sometimes pull a handful out 
of his pocket to show us. He was tall, with finely 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 127 

cut features, black silky hair and neatly pointed beard, 
and withal a peculiarly soft and silken, deliberate 
manner of speech. Considerable were our surprise and 
amusement when some dozen years later we found his 
outward looks and bearing, and particularly his 
characteristic turns of speech, with something of 
dangerous power which his presence suggested as 
lying behind so much polished blandness, evoked and 
idealized by Stevenson in his creation of the personage 
of Attwater in that grimmest of island stories, The 
Ebb Tide. In telling anything of special interest 
that had happened to himself, Dew-Smith had a trick 
of avoiding the first person singular, and instead of 
saying " I did " or "I felt " so and so would say 
abstractly in the third, " one did " or " one felt." 
This scrupulous manner of non-egotism, I remember, 
came with specially odd effect when one day he was 
telling us how an official at a railway station had been 
offensively rude to him. " What did you do ? " he 
was asked, and replied in a deprecating voice, " Well, 
you know, one had to put him through the door- 
panels." It is this aspect of Dew-Smith's character 
which no doubt suggested, although it did not really 
much resemble, the ruthless task-master, the man of 
stern Calvinistic doctrine and iron fatalism, who is 
the other half of Stevenson's Attwater. 

Stevenson has interpreted the aspects and the thrill 
of out-door nature as magically as anyone in written 
words, but was not prone to talk about them. " No 
human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 
minutes at a time," he declares in his essay on Talk 



128 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and Talkers ; and I cannot remember that he used 
ever to say much about the forest of Fontainebleau 
or the other scenes in France which he loved so well 
and frequented so much in these years, or even about 
those excursions which he was busy turning to such 
happy literary account in An Inland Voyage and 
Travels with a Donkey. Literature and human 
life were ever his main themes ; including sometimes, 
but of course with his closest intimates only, the 
problems of his own life. By and by such intimates 
became aware that these problems had taken on a 
new and what might easily have turned into a tragical 
complexity. He had been for some time in the habit 
of frequenting the artist haunts of the Fontainebleau 
forest in the company of his cousin Bob Stevenson, 
for the sake of health and ease of mind and of the 
open-air life and congenial irresponsible company he 
found there. In those haunts it presently became 
apparent he had met his fate. To escape from hope- 
less conjugal troubles, a Mrs. Strong from California, 
we learnt, had come and for the time being settled 
there with her daughter and young son. She was 
some dozen years older than Stevenson, but fate had 
destined them for each other, and their momentary 
mutual attraction soon settled — for each was as far as 
possible from being a light-o'-love — into the unbreak- 
able bond of a life-time. After a while the lady had to 
return to California, and there sought and was able to 
obtain freedom by divorce. Stevenson had promptly 
followed her, saying nothing of his intention to his 
parents, who he knew would disapprove it, and trusting 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 129 

wholly to the meagre resources he was in those days 
able to command by his pen. Then followed for those 
of us who loved him and were in the secret a period of 
sore anxiety. There reached us from time to time 
scanty news of his discomforts undergone in the 
emigrant ship and train, and of his dangerous and 
complicated illnesses afterwards, and evidences withal 
of his indomitable will and courage in the shape of 
new tales and essays composed for his livelihood in 
circumstances under which any less resolute spirit 
must have sunk. Reconciled with his parents after 
a while by the fact of his marriage, he brought his 
wife home to them in the late summer of 1880. She 
made an immediate conquest of them, especially of 
that character so richly compounded between the 
stubborn and the tender, the humorous and the grim, 
his father. Thenceforth there was always at Louis's 
side a wife for his friends to hold only second in affec- 
tion to himself. A separate biography of her by her 
sister has lately appeared, giving, along with many 
interesting details of her early life, a picture of her on 
the whole softer and less striking than that which I 
personally retain. Strength and staunchness were, as 
I saw her, her ruling qualities ; strength and staunch- 
ness not indeed masculine in their kind, but truly 
womanly. Against those of his friends who might 
forget or ignore the precautions which his health de- 
manded she could be a dragon indeed ; but the more 
considerate among them she made warmly her own 
and was ever ready to welcome. Deep and rich 
capacities were in her, alike for tragedy and humour ; 



130 MEMORIES A1STD NOTES 

all her moods, thoughts, and instincts were vividly- 
genuine and her own, and her daily talk, like her 
letters, was admirable both for play of character and 
feeling and for choice and colour of words. On those 
who knew the pair first after their marriage her person- 
ality impressed itself almost as vividly as his ; and 
in my own mind his image lives scarce more indelibly 
than that of the small, dark-complexioned, eager, 
devoted woman his mate. In spite of her squareish 
build she was supple and elastic in all her movements ; 
her hands and feet were small and beautifully modelled, 
though not meant for, or used to, idleness ; the head, 
under its crop of close-waving thick black hair, was 
of a build and character that somehow suggested 
Napoleon, by the firm setting of the jaw and the beauti- 
fully precise and delicate modelling of the nose and 
lips : the eyes were full of sex and mystery as they 
changed from fire or fun to gloom or tenderness; 
and it was from between a fine pearly set of small teeth 
that there came the clear metallic accents of her in- 
tensely human and often quaintly individual speech. 
The journey to California, with its risks and hard- 
ships, had had results as damaging to Stevenson's 
health as they were needful and fruitful for his happi- 
ness. After his return in the late summer of 1880 
it was under much more positively invalid conditions 
than before that his friends found themselves obliged 
to seek his company. My chief special recollections 
of him during the next few years date almost entirely 
from places where he had gone in hopes of recovery or 
respite from his complicated and crippling troubles 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 131 

of nerve, artery and lung. Just as little as the restric- 
tions of the sick-room, galling to him above all men, 
had power to hinder his industry and success as a 
writer, so little did they impair his charm as a talker 
when he was allowed to talk at all. Occasionally, 
and oftener as time went on, hemorrhages from the 
lung, or the immediate threat of them, enforced upon 
him periods of absolute silence, during which he could 
only communicate on paper with those about him, 
writing with blotting-pad against his knees as he lay 
in his red flannel dressing-gown propped against 
pillows in his bed. But in the intervals of respite his 
friends had the happiness of finding life and letters 
and art, experience and the possibilities of experience, 
once more irradiated for them as vividly as before, or 
even more vividly yet, in the glow and magic of his 
conversation. 

For the first two years after his return Stevenson 
spent the winters (1880-81, 1881-82) at the Swiss 
mountain station of Davos, which had just begun to 
come into repute as a place of cure, and the summers at 
one resort or another in the bracing climate of the 
Scottish Highlands. The Davos of 1880, approached 
by a laborious seven hours' sledge-drive and vastly 
different from the luxurious and expanded Davos of 
to-day, consisted of the old Swiss village of Davos-Platz, 
clustered round its high-spired church, with one central 
group of German hotels in or close adjoining the village, 
and another smaller but more scattered group of English 
hotels at a little distance beside the open road in the 
direction of the minor village of Davos-Dorf. The 



132 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Stevenson quarters for this first winter were at the 
Hotel Belvedere, then a mere miniature nucleus of its 
latter-day self. I shall never forget his first reception 
of me there. It was about Christmas, 1880 ; I arrived 
late ; and the moment dinner was over he had me 
out and up a short hill at the back of the hotel. There 
had only lately fallen enough snow to allow the sport 
of tobogganing to be started : there was a steep 
zigzag run down from a hut on the hill to near the 
hotel : he got me into the toboggan by moonlight, we 
started down the run, capsized at a corner, rolled over 
and over with our mouths and pockets full of snow, 
and walked home in tearing spirits. Nothing could 
have been more like him, and nothing (of course) 
much worse for him. My impression of the next few 
weeks at Davos is one of high tension of the soul and 
body in that tingling mountain air, under the iron 
moonlit frosts or the mid-day dazzle of the snow- 
fields ; of the haunting sense of tragedy (of one tragedy 
in especial which touched us both to the heart) among 
that company, for the most part doomed or stricken, 
with faces tanned by sun and frost into masks belying 
their real plight : of endless bouts of eager, ever courte- 
ous give-and-take over the dark Valtellina wine between 
Stevenson and John Addington Symonds, in whom 
he had found a talker almost as charming as himself, 
exceeding him by far in range and accuracy of know- 
ledge and culture, as was to be expected in the author 
of the History of the Renaissance in Italy, but nothing 
like his match, I thought, in essential sanity of human 
judgment or in the power of illumination by unfore- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 133 

seeable caprices of humour and fantasy. The reader 
can if he pleases turn to Stevenson's own impression 
of these conversations, whether as generalized after- 
ward in the essay Talk and Talkers, where Symonds 
figures as Opalstein, or as set down in a letter at the 
time : — " I like Symonds very well, though he is much, 
I think, of an invalid in mind and character. But his 
mind is interesting, with many beautiful corners, and 
his consumptive smile very winning to see. We have 
had some good talks ; one went over Zola, Balzac, 
Flaubert, Whitman, Christ, Handel, Milton, Sir Thomas 
Browne ; do you see the liaison ? — in another, I, the 
Bohnist, the un-Grecian, was the means of his conversion 
in the matter of the A j ax. " It is interesting to compare 
with these words Symonds's own retrospect on the 
same days and talks written six years after Stevenson's 
death : "I have never lived in Davos a better time 
than I lived then ; it has been so full of innocent jollity 
and beautiful Bohemianism, so sweetened by the 
strong clear spirit of that unique sprite whom all the 
world claims for its own now — R. L. Stevenson. . . . 
So gracious and so pure a light has never fallen upon 
my path as fell from his fantastic and yet intensely 
human genius — the beautiful companionship of the 
Shelley-like man, the eager, gifted wife, and the boy 
for whom they both thought in all their ways and 
hours." 

Neither from the first of the two Highland summers 
nor the second Alpine winter do I retain any impres- 
sions as strong and definite as those I have last set 
down, though I was with him for a part of both, and 



134 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

though the August and September weeks of 1881 at 
Braemar were marked by the excitement of the first 
conception and discussion of the tale of The Sea- 
Cook, which afterward developed into Treasure Island. 
They were remarkable also for the disgust of the 
patient at being condemned to wear a specially con- 
trived and hideous kind of pig's-snout respirator for 
the inhalation of pine-oil, as related in a well known 
rhyming letter of the time to Henley. But from the 
second Highland summer dates another vivid recollec- 
tion. While his wife remained with his parents at 
Edinburgh, I spent two or three weeks of radiant 
weather alone with him in the old hotel at Kingussie 
in Inverness-shire. He had little strength either for 
work or exercise but managed to draft the tale The 
Treasure of Franchard, and rejoiced in lying out for 
hours at a time half stripped in the sun, nearly accord- 
ing to that manner of sun-bath since so much prescribed 
by physicians in Germany. The burn or mountain 
streamlet at the back of Kingussie village is for about 
a mile of its course after it leaves the moor one of the 
most varied and beautiful in Scotland, racing with a 
hundred little falls and lynns beside the margin of an 
enchanting fir-belted, green and dingled oval glade. 
The glade, alas, has long ago been invaded and annexed 
by golfers, enemies to peace ; and even the approaches 
to the burn from the village have, I understand, been 
ruined by the erection of a great modern distillery. 
But in the year 1882 we had these haunts to ourselves. 
Stevenson used to spend hours exploring the recesses 
of the burn's course, musing, sometimes with and 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 135 

sometimes without speech, on its endless chances and 
caprices of eddy and ripple and back-set, its branchings 
and reunitings, alternations of race and pool, bustle 
and pause, and on the images of human life, free-will, 
and destiny presented by the careers of the sticks 
and leaves he found or launched upon its course. 
One result of these musings occurs in a dramatic scene 
familiar to all who have read his fragment, The 
Great North Road. Of other talk what I remember 
best is the entertainment with which he read for the 
first time Leigh Hunt's milk-and-water dilution of 
Dante in his poem Francesca da Rimini (or Nimini- 
pimini as Byron re-christened it), and of the laughing 
parodies which bubbled over from him on those passages 
of tea-party sentiment and cockney bathos that disfigure 
it. Some kind of play, too, I remember which he 
insisted on starting and keeping up, and wherein he 
invested his companion (that was me) with the imagin- 
ary character of a roystering blade in a white greatcoat 
and knobstick making scandal in the Highland village, 
and himself with that of a sedate and friendly burgess 
hard put to it to save me from the hands of the police. 
The following winter took the Stevensons to the 
Provencal coast, but to haunts there at some distance 
from those he had known ten years ago. After some 
unsuccessful attempts to settle near Marseilles (Steven- 
son always loved the colour and character of that 
mighty Mediterranean and cosmopolitan trading-port), 
they were established by March, 1884, in the Chalet 
la Solitude on the hill behind Hyeres ; and on that 
charming site he enjoyed the best months of health 



136 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and happiness he ever knew, at least on the European 
continent. His various expressions in prose and verse 
of pleasure in his life there are well-known. For 
instance, the following from a letter to Mr. Gosse : — 
" This spot, our garden and our view, are sub-celestial. 
I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, 

' I dwell already the next door to Heaven ! ' 

If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my fig- 
marigolds, and my olives, and my view over a plain, 
and my view of certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, 
as severe as Zeus, you would not think the phrase 
exaggerated." One or two sets of verses dallying 
with the notion that here might be his permanent home 
and anchorage have only lately been published. I 
give another set written in a somewhat homelier strain, 
which I think has not yet found its way into print : — 

My wife and I, in our romantic cot, 

The world forgetting, by the world forgot, 

High as the gods upon Olympus dwell, 

Pleased with the things we have, and pleased as well 

To wait in hope for those which we have not. 

She burns in ardour for a horse to trot ; 
I pledge my votive powers upon a yacht ; 
Which shall be first remembered, who can tell — 
My wife or I ? 

Harvests of flowers o'er all our garden-plot 
She dreams ; and I to enrich a darker spot, 
My unprovided cellar ; both to swell 
Our narrow cottage huge as a hotel, 
That portly friends may come and share our lot — 
My wife and I. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 137 

The first friend to come was one not physically 
corresponding to the adjective, namely myself. It 
was the moment when the Southern spring was in its 
first flush and freshness, and the days and evenings 
sped gloriously. Everything, down to the deche or 
money pinch to which recent expenses had reduced 
him, or the misdeeds of the black Skye-terrier Woggs, 
the most engaging, petted, ill-conducted and cajoling 
little thorough-bred rascal of his race, was turned by 
Stevenson into a matter of abounding delight or diver- 
sion. No schemes of work could for the time being 
seem too many or too arduous. A flow of verse, more 
continuous and varied than ever before, had set in 
from him. Besides many occasional pieces expressing 
intimate moods of the moment with little care or finish, 
and never intended for any eye but his own, those of 
the special Child's Garden series were nearly com- 
pleted ; and they and their dedication, as in duty 
bound, to his old nurse Alison Cunningham had to 
be canvassed between us. So had a much more arduous 
matter, the scheme and style of Prince Otto, its 
general idea having gradually, under much discussion, 
been evolved from an earlier one where the problems 
and characters would have been similar but the setting 
and date Oriental and remote. So had a scheme to 
be put in hand next after that, namely, a new tale 
for boys ; this time a historical tale, which duly took 
shape as The Black Arrow, to be slighted later on, 
quite unjustly as I have always thought, by its author 
and his family as " tushery." 

One day, looking from one of the hill terraces from 



138 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

near his house at the group of islets (the isles of Hyeres) 
in the offing, we had let our talk wander to famous 
and more distant archipelagoes of the same inland 
sea. I spoke of the likeness in unlikeness which 
strikes the traveller between the noble outlines and 
colours of the Ionian group, as they rise facing the 
coasts of Acarnania, Elis, and Epirus, and those of 
the group of the Inner Hebrides over against the shores 
of Ross and Argyleshire. We ran over the blunt 
monosyllabic names of some of the Hebridean group — 
Coll, Mull, Eigg, Rum, Muck, and Skye — and contrasted 
them with the euphonious Greek sounds, Leucadia, 
Cephalonia, Ithaca, Zante or Zacynthos (" Jam medio 
apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos " had for some 
unaccountable reason been Stevenson's favourite line 
of Virgil from boyhood, and he goes out of his way to 
make occasion for one of his characters to quote it 
in almost the latest of his sea-tales, The Ebb Tide). 
And we speculated on a book to be written that should 
try to strike the several notes of these two island regions, 
of their scenery, inhabitants, and traditions, of Greek 
and Gaelic lay and legend, and the elements of Homeric 
and Ossianic poetry. I think the idea was no bad 
one, and that perhaps such a book has still to be, and 
will some day be, written. But Stevenson, with his 
lack of Greek and of the Greek scholar's special 
enthusiasm, and the unlikelihood of his being able to 
work much in libraries, would perhaps hardly have 
been the man to attempt it. Nevertheless, having 
frequented the Hebrides group and drunk in its romance 
from youth in the lighthouse yacht, and again on a 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 139 

special excursion with Sir Walter Simpson in 1874, 
he was much attracted by the scheme. And when 
some eight months later, by what I believe was a pure 
coincidence, he received a proposal from a firm of 
publishers that he should take a cruise in the Greek 
archipelago with a view to a volume that should tell 
of his experiences in a manner something like that of 
his former small volumes of travel in France, our talk 
of the spring, recurring to him, made him take warmly 
to the notion. He wrote to me at once on the question 
of introductions, and went to Nice, partly to make 
inquiries about Mediterranean steam-packets and 
partly to ask medical advice. The latter confirmed, I 
believe, what was the judgment of his wife that the 
risks of the trip would be too great ; and the idea was 
dropped. 

In my next glimpse of him there were elements of 
comedy. I had gone for a few weeks' travel in Southern 
Italy, and meaning to return by sea and across France 
from Naples, with a very short time to spare before 
I was due back in London, had asked the Stevensons 
if they would come and meet me for a day or so at 
Marseilles. They came, and it was a happy meeting. 
But I discovered that I had miscalculated travelling 
expenses and had not enough cash in hand to finish 
my homeward journey. He found himself in the proud 
position of being able to help me, but only at the cost 
of leaving his own pockets empty. He had to remain 
in Marseilles until I could reimburse him from Paris, 
and amused himself with some stanzas in honour of the 
place and the occasion : — 



140 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

"Long time I lay in little ease 
Where, paced by the Turanian, 
Marseilles, the many-masted, sees 
The blue Mediterranean. 

Now songful in the hour of sport, 

Now riotous for wages, 
She camps around her ancient port, 

An ancient of the ages. 

Algerian airs through all the place 

Unconquerably sally ; 
Incomparable women pace 

The shadows of the alley. 

And high o'er dock and graving-yard 

And where the sky is paler, 
The Golden Virgin of the Guard 

Shines, beckoning the sailor. 

She hears the city roar on high, 
Thief, prostitute, and banker : 

She sees the masted vessels he 
Immovably at anchor. 

She sees the snowy islets dot 

The sea's immortal azure, 
And If, that castellated spot, 

Tower, turret and embrazure. 

Here Dantes pined ; and here to-day 

Behold me his successor : 
For here imprisoned long I lay 

In pledge for a professor ! " * 

* In the recent volume, " New Poems," this little piece has 
unluckily been published with the misprints " placed " for " paced " 
in the first stanza, " as " for " an " in the second, and " dark " 
for " dock " in the fourth ; the last stanza, which gives the whole 
its only point and raison d'etre, being left out. The allusions 
concerning Dantes and the Chateau d'lf point, of course, to the 
Monte Cristo of the elder Dumas. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 141 

Seven or eight months later a violent and all but 
fatal return of illness dashed the high hopes which 
had been raised by the happy Provencal spring and 
summer. An epidemic of cholera following made him 
leave the Mediterranean shore for good and sent him 
home to England. He arrived to all appearance and 
according to almost all medical prognostics a confirmed 
and even hopeless invalid. His home for the next 
three years was at Bournemouth. He was subject to 
frequent haemorrhages from the lung, any of which 
might have proved fatal and which had to be treated 
with styptic remedies of the strongest and most nerve- 
shaking kind. Much of his life was spent on the sofa, 
much in that kind of compulsory silence which up 
till now had at worst been only occasional. Now 
and again a few weeks of respite enabled him to make 
cautious excursions, once as far as Paris, once to 
Matlock, once or more on my invitation to Cambridge, 
but oftenest to London. Here his resort was not 
to hotels, but as an ever-welcome guest to the official 
house I had lately come to inhabit within the gates 
of the British Museum. His industry, maintained 
against harder conditions than ever, showed itself all 
the more indomitable and at last had its reward. 
The success of Treasure Island published before he 
left Hyeres, was by the time he settled at Bourne- 
mouth beginning to make his name a popular one. 
Two and a half years later Jelcyll and Hyde raised 
it suddenly into resounding fame, and was immedi- 
ately followed by Kidnapped which was by common 
consent acclaimed as the best Scotch tale since the 



142 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Waverleys. For part of the Bournemouth time he 
was also much engaged in joint work with Henley 
on the plays Admiral Guinea, Beau Austin, and 
Macaire: and upon this, the lustiest and not always 
the most considerate of guests and collaborators, Mrs. 
Stevenson found herself compelled in the interest of 
her husband's health to lay restrictions which were 
resented, and sowed the first seeds, I think, of that 
estrangement at heart of Henley from his friend so 
lamentably proclaimed by him in public after Steven- 
son's death. 

Ill as he was in these years, Stevenson was able to 
bind to himself in close friendship not a few new-comers, 
including two eminent Americans, Henry James and 
the painter J. S. Sargent. I went down myself from 
time to time, and enjoyed his company not less, only 
with more of anxiety and misgiving, than of old. 
Sargent's little picture showing him indescribably 
lean in his velvet jacket as he paces to and fro twirling 
his moustache with one hand and holding his cigarette 
in the other as he talks — St. Gaudens's bronze relief 
of him propped on pillows on the sofa (the latter a 
work done two or three years later in America) — these 
tally pretty closely in their different ways with the 
images I carry in my mind of his customary looks and 
attitudes in those Bournemouth days. Always except 
once I found him as cheerful as ever, and as vivid a 
focus of cheerfulness. The sole exception remains 
deeply printed on my memory. I had followed him 
from the house into the garden ; he was leaning with 
his back to me looking out from the garden gate ; as he 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 143 

heard me approach, he turned round upon me a face 
such as I never saw on him save that once — a face of 
utter despondency, nay tragedy, upon which seemed 
stamped for one concentrated moment the expression 
of all he had ever had, or might yet have, in life to 
suffer or to renounce. Such a countenance was not 
to be accosted, and I left him. During his visits to 
my house at the British Museum — " the many-pillared 
and the well-beloved," as he calls it in the well-known 
set of verses, as though the keepers' houses stood 
within the great front colonnade of the museum, which 
they do not, but project in advance of it on either flank 
— during such visits he never showed anything but 
the old charm and high courage and patience. He 
was able to enjoy something of the company of famous 
seniors who came seeking his acquaintance, as Browning, 
Lowell, Burne-Jones. With such visitors I usually 
left him alone, and have at any rate no detailed notes 
or memories of conversations held by him with them 
in my presence. What I remember most vividly was 
how one day I came in from my work and found 
the servants, who were devoted to him, waiting for 
me in the hall with scared faces. He had had a worse 
haemorrhage than usual, and lay propped on his pillows 
in his red dressing-gown with pencil in hand and 
foolscap paper against his knees. He greeted me with 
finger on lip and a smile half humorous half ruefully 
deprecating, as though in apology for being so trouble- 
some a guest ; handing me at the same time a sheet 
on which he had written the words from Falstaff, 
" 'Tis my vocation, Hal." Then, with a changed 



144 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

look of expectant curiosity and adventure, he wrote, 
"Do you think it will faucher me this time ? " (French 
faucher, to mow down, to kill, make an end of.) I 
forget how the conversation, spoken on my side, 
written on his, went on. With his intimates and those 
of his household he held many such, and it would have 
been interesting to keep the sheets on which his side 
of the talk, often illustrated with comic sketches, was 
set down. So would it have been interesting to keep 
another record of the same illness, namely the little 
lumps or pats of modellers' wax which he asked me 
to get for him and with which, when he could not talk, 
read or write, he amused himself moulding tiny scenes 
with figures and landscapes in relief. These were 
technically childish, of course, but had always, like 
the woodcuts done to amuse his stepson at Davos, a 
touch of lively expressiveness and character. Some 
dozens of them, I remember, he finished, but no vestige 
of them remains. They were put into a drawer, dried, 
cracked, and were thrown away. 

My next vision of him is the last, and shows him 
as he stood with his family looking down upon me 
over the rail of the outward-bound steamship Lud- 
gate Hill while I waved a parting hand to him from 
a boat in the Thames by Tilbury Dock. From our 
first meeting in Suffolk until his return with his wife 
from California in 1880 had been one spell of seven 
years. From that return until his fresh departure 
in 1887 had been another. Now followed the winter 
spent at Saranac Lake in the Adirondack mountains ; 
the two years and odd months of cruising among the 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 145 

various archipelagoes of the Pacific — the Marquesas, 
the Paumotus, the Society Islands, the Sandwich 
group, Samoa, the Gilberts again, the Marshalls. The 
lure of the South Seas and the renewed capacity for 
out-door life and adventure he found in himself during 
these voyagings had gradually forced upon both 
Stevenson and his wife the conclusion that there was 
but one thing for him to do, and that was to settle 
somewhere in the Pacific for good. He had written 
as much to his friends in England, telling them at the 
same time of the property he had bought in Samoa 
and on which he proposed to build himself a home. 
Several earlier letters which would have prepared us 
for this news had miscarried, so that when the announce- 
ment came it was a rude shock to those who loved 
him and were looking forward eagerly to his return. 
At Sydney, in August, 1890, he received our replies. 
Mine was of a tenor which cut the warm hearts of 
both the pair to the quick, although not serving to 
deflect their purpose. In spite of the fine work he 
had done during his voyages, I persuaded myself 
that from living permanently in that outlandish 
world and far from cultivated society both he and his 
writing must deteriorate, and wrote warning him as 
much in plain terms. Translating unconsciously my 
own need and desire for his company into a persuasion 
that mine was needed, as of old, for criticism and 
suggestion to him in his work, and that he no longer 
valued it, I wrote reproachfully, pleading against and 
prophesying evil from his purpose. He and his wife 
both set themselves then and there to justify their 



146 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

decision in letters of which, reverting to them now 
after thirty years, I find the terms infinitely touching 
and too sacred almost to quote. Referring to one of 
his recent cruises, Stevenson says : — 

We had a very delightful voyage for some part ; it would have 
been delightful to the end had my health held out. That it did 
not, I attribute to savage hard work in a wild cabin heated like 
the Babylonian furnace, four plies of blotting-paper under my wet 
hand and the drops trailing from my brow. For God's sake don't 
start in to blame Fanny : often enough she besought me not to 
go on : but I did my work while I was a bedridden worm in England, 
and please God I shall do my work until I burst. I do not know 
any other virtue that I possess ; and indeed there are few others 
I prize alongside of it. Only, one other I have : I love my friends, 
and I don't like to hear the most beloved of all casting doubt on 
that affection. Did you not get the verses I sent you from Ape- 
mama ? I guess they were not Al verses, but they expressed 
something you surely could not doubt.* But perhaps all my 
letters have miscarried ? A sorrow on correspondence ! If this 
miscarry too ? See here : if by any chance this should come to 
your hand, understand once and for all that since my dear wild 
noble father died no head on earth is more precious to my thoughts 
than yours. . . . But all this talk is useless. Know this, I love 
you, and since I am speaking plainly for once, I bind it upon you 
as a sacred duty, should you be dangerously ill, I must be sum- 
moned. I will never forgive you if I am not. So long as there 
is no danger, I do well, do I not ? — to consider conditions necessary 
to my work and health. I have a charge of souls ; I keep many 
eating and drinking ; my continued life has a value of its own ; 
and I cannot but feel it. But I have to see you again. That is 
sure. And — how strangely we are made ! — I see no harm in my 

* These are the verses "To S. C." afterwards printed as No. 
XXXVI in the volume Songs of Travel. In point of fact the 
package containing them had for the time being failed to reach me. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 147 

dying like a burst pig upon some outlandish island, but if you 
died, without due notice and a chance for me to see you, I should 
count it a disloyalty. 

Here Stevenson's hand has failed and his wife takes 
up the letter, and in many urgent, not less affectionate 
phrases continues to enforce his plea : — 

Dear Custodian, — 

I hardly dare use that word with the knowledge in my heart 
that we intend to remove our bodily selves from out your custody> 
but as you know it will be our vile bodies only ; spiritually we are 
yours and always shall be. Neither time nor space can change us 
in that. You told me when we left England if we found a place 
where Louis was really well to stay there. It really seems that 
anywhere in the South Seas will do. Ever since we have been here 
we have been on the outlook for a spot that combines the most 
advantages. In some way I preferred the Marquesas, the climate 
being perfect and the natives people that I admired and loved. 
The only suitable place on the Sandwich islands is at the foot of 
a volcano where we should have to live upon black lava and trust 
to rain for water. Besides I could not bear the white population. 
All things considered, Samoa took our fancy the most ; there are 
three opportunities each month to communicate with England by 
telegraph from Auckland, Auckland being from seven to eight 
days' steam distance from us. You could hardly believe your 
own eyes if you could see Louis in his present state of almost rude 
health, no cough, no haemorrhage, no night sweats. He rides 
and walks as much as he likes without any fatigue, and in fact 
lives the life of a man who is well. I tremble when I think of a 
return to England. 

He never returned to England, and a third spell 
of seven years in his life had just been completed when 
on one gloomy, gusty, sodden December day in 1894, 
I came down from lunching with Sir Harry Johnston, 



148 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

the African traveller and administrator, in the upper 
floor of a Government office in Westminster, and saw 
newspaper posters flapping dankly in the street corners, 
with the words " Death of R. L. Stevenson " printed 
large upon them. The Pacific voyages and the island 
life had, or seemed to have, effectually healed his 
troubles of nerve, throat, and lung ; but the old 
arterial weakness remained, and after so many years 
of unsparing mental toil the bursting of a blood-vessel 
in his brain had laid him low at the critical moment of 
his fully ripening power. 

During that third and last period the day-dreams 
of the Mentone days had after all and in spite of all 
and against all likelihood been realized for him. Fame 
as a writer even beyond his aspirations had come to be 
his. Of voyagings in far-off oceans, of happy out-door 
activities and busy beneficent responsibilities in roman- 
tic circumstances and outlandish scenes, he had had his 
fill. Withal his love of his old friends had amid his 
new experiences and successes never weakened. Of 
this no one had ampler or more solid proofs than I. 
That amidst all his other absorbing interests, and in 
spite of his ever-growing passion and assiduity in 
literary work, he should never once have failed in 
sending off to me his regular full budget of a monthly 
letter, either written with his own hand or dictated 
to his step-daughter, would have been proof enough in 
itself of such steadfastness. On the side of his friends 
at home, speaking at least for myself, I fear that our 
joy in the news of his returning strength and activity 
had been tempered by something of latent jealousy 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 149 

that so much good could befall him without help of 
ours and at a distance of half the world away from us. 
I know that I was inclined to be hypercritical about 
the quality and value of some of the work sent home 
from the Pacific. I thought the series of papers 
afterwards arranged into the volume In the South 
Seas overloaded with information and the results of 
study, and disappointingly lacking in the thrill and 
romance one expected of him in relating experiences 
which had realized the dream of his youth. (I ought 
to mention that a far better qualified judge, Mr. Joseph 
Conrad, differs from me in this, and even prefers In 
the South Seas to Treasure Island, principally for 
the sake of what he regards as a very masterpiece 
of native portraiture in the character of Tembinok, 
King of Apemama.) 

Again, I thought it a pity that Stevenson should 
spend so much toil in setting out, in the volume A 
Footnote to History, the details of certain complicated, 
very remote and petty recent affairs in which none 
except perhaps a few international diplomatists could 
well be expected to take interest. Of his work in 
fiction dealing with the islands, I thought most of 
The Wrecker below his mark, and The Ebb Tide, 
at least the first half of it, a comparatively dull and 
rather brutal piece of realism. True, these were col- 
laboration pieces ; and of island stories there was 
The Beach of Falesd, and of Scottish tales Catriona, 
which were all his own and of which the quality should 
have fully re-assured one (the master-fragment Weir 
of Hermiston was of course unknown to us till after 



150 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

his death). But thinking as I did, I said so in my letters 
with the old frankness, causing him for once a shade 
of displeasure : for he wrote to me that I was being 
a little too Cockney with him, and to a common 
friend that I was getting to be something of an auld 
wife with my criticisms. Well, well, perhaps I was, 
perhaps not. But at any rate I have proof in full 
measure that his affection for and memory of me sur- 
vived and underwent no change. One such proof, scarce 
less surprising than endearing, came to me but the 
other day, long after his death, in the shape of a bulky 
packet sent to me by his representatives in America. 
On opening the packet I found that it contained 
almost the whole mass of my letters written to him 
from the beginning of our friendship to the end. Con- 
sidering the vagrant habits of his youth, his long dislike 
of and detachment from all the ordinary impedimenta 
of lif e, his frequent changes of abode even after marriage 
and success had made of him a comparatively settled 
and propertied man — considering these things, that 
he should have cumbered himself by the preservation 
of so bulky a correspondence was a thing to me natur- 
ally undreamed of and when discovered infinitely 
touching. As concerns my regard and regret for him, 
— there has been hardly a day in the thirty and odd 
years since he left us on which I, like others who loved 
him, have not missed him. His cousin Bob Stevenson, 
in some gifts and brilliancies almost his match, used 
to vow that the chief interest of anything which 
happened was to hear what Louis would say about it. 
World-events in war and politics and mankind's 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 151 

material experiments and physical conquests in the 
last few years have been too tremendous in themselves 
for so much to be said of any man without absurdity. 
But want him and long for him one does, to hear him 
talk both of them and of a thousand lesser things : 
most of all perhaps of those writers who have stepped 
into fame since his time. If we could have him back 
among us, as one sometimes has him in day-dreams, 
how we, his old friends and comrades in letters — but 
alas ! with what gaps among us, Henry James gone, 
Andrew Lang gone, and so many others — how would 
we make haste to gather about him : and when we 
had had our turn, how eagerly would he look round for 
the younger fellow-craftsmen, Sir James Barrie, Mr. 
Kipling — not now indeed so young — whose promise 
he had recognized and with whom in his last years he 
had exchanged greetings across the ocean. Of those 
who had not begun to publish before he died the man 
I imagine him calling for first of all is the above- 
mentioned Mr. Conrad. Some time about 1880-90 
these two seafarers, the Polish gentleman turned 
British merchant-skipper and the ocean-loving author 
cruising far and wide in search of health, might quite 
well have met in life, only that the archipelago of Mr. 
Conrad's chief experiences was the Malay, that of 
Stevenson's the Polynesian. Could my dream be 
fulfilled, how they would delight in meeting now. 
What endless ocean and island yarns the two would 
exchange ; how happily they would debate the methods 
and achievements of their common art ; and how 
difficult it would be to part them ! As I let myself 



152 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

imagine such meeting, I know not which of the two 
presences is the more real and near to me, yours, my 
good friend Conrad, whom I hope and mean to greet 
in the flesh to-morrow or the next day or the next, or 
that of Stevenson, since my last sight of whom, as he 
waved good-bye to me from the deck of the " Ludgate 
Hill," I know as a fact of arithmetic, but can in no 
other sense realize, that there has passed a spell of 
no less than four-and-thirty years or the life-time of 
a whole generation. 



CHAPTER IX 

FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 

Among the very few seniors of note or standing in 
Edinburgh who had seen the promise that lay under 
Stevenson's questionable, to some eyes merely rakish, 
outside in youth were Fleeming Jenkin, the professor 
of mechanical engineering, and his wife. The names 
of these two are not so famous as most of those to 
which I have a separate chapter in the present book. 
But alike by gift and character they were a very 
remarkable couple, each of them possessed of talents 
which in their several ways fell barely short of genius. 
Stevenson lived to repay the debt his youth had owed 
to the kindness and insight of these friends by writing 
a full biography of Jenkin, whom a chance blood- 
poisoning carried off suddenly and prematurely, in 
the mid exercise of unabated energies and the full 
glow of anticipated achievement. His widow survived 
him six and thirty years, dying but the other day and 
reducing almost below computation the number of 
those still living who can remember Stevenson in his 
youth. 

The story of Fleeming Jenkin's life may be quickly 
told. He was born in 1833. By his father's side he 

153 



154 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

came of a Welsh stock settled in Kent ; his mother, 
born in Jamaica of Scottish parentage, was a lady of 
talent and spirit, the author of novels which had a 
reputation in their day, — Cousin Stella, Who Breaks 
Pays, Two French Marriages, etc. Both these parents, 
dying at an unusual old age within a few hours of 
each other, our friend Fleeming had, when death 
overtook him, but lately carried to their graves. 
The experiences of his youth had been both varied 
and vivid. He was at school first at Jedburgh, then 
at Frankfort-on-the-Main, then in Paris, where he 
was an eager witness of the scenes of revolution in 
1848. Thence he went to the University of Genoa, 
where he took a degree in 1850, and immediately 
afterwards began the practical business of his life in an 
engineer's workshop. One result of this cosmopolitan 
training on his exact and retentive mind was a life- 
long mastery, more thorough than that of most profess- 
ing linguists, of the three chief European languages. 
Returning to England at eighteen, Jenkin worked for 
the next six years under several firms successively, 
chiefly at railway enterprises in England and abroad ; 
next for several years, in connection with Sir William 
Thomson, at the manufacture, testing, and laying down 
of several of the great submarine telegraph lines. There- 
after he held, in English and European repute, a place 
as one of the first, both theoretically and practically, 
of living electrical engineers. In 1859 he had married 
the daughter of Alfred Austin, Esq., C.B., a lady sharing 
in full measure the gifts that have distinguished her 
family. From 1861 to 1868 he carried on a business 



FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 155 

of his own in London, and in the latter year was called 
to the professorship of engineering at Edinburgh, 
having for two years already filled a corresponding 
chair at University College. At Edinburgh he con- 
tinued to reside until his death : energetic and success- 
ful in teaching, indefatigable in invention and in the 
application of science to human necessities. For the 
last two years a large part — unhappily too large — of 
his energies was thrown into the working out of a 
system he had invented of cheap electrical transport, 
adapted especially for short distances and relatively 
light freights. This system be called " Telpherage," 
and believed ardently in its practical usefulness and 
future commercial importance. Presumably the effec- 
tual sagacity and foresight which had up till then 
distinguished his professional career had in this instance 
failed him, seeing that his invention, at least in the 
form in which he conceived it, has not, I learn, taken 
root. The anxiety and overwork involved in connec- 
tion with it had somewhat shaken the ordinary robust- 
ness of his health ; but he seemed to have quite recov- 
ered, when a slight operation, for the remedy of a 
mischief not alarming, brought on the illness which 
snatched him suddenly from among us. 

Of the main business of Jenkin's career as above 
stated, as well as of his vigorous and fruitful initiative 
in the matters of technical education, of the organiza- 
tion of sanitary inspection and reform, and the like, 
I speak with little understanding. But it was the 
secondary labours — the -rrdpepya — of his life that 
impressed those of his friends who, like myself, could 



156 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

only take other people's judgments on his main work, 
with so strong a sense of the extraordinary vigour 
and variety of his powers. You were always making 
the discovery of some new attainment or proficiency 
in him of which he would show no sign until the occasion 
for it naturally arose. There was no discussion in 
which he would not join, and no subject in which he 
did not take an interest ; and such were his natural 
keenness of apprehension, and integrity and acuteness 
of judgment, that there seemed almost none on which 
he was not able to throw light. Attention was called 
not long after his death to the circumstance that out 
of four elaborate studies on subjects not especially 
his own, which he contributed to the North British 
Review, three were highly valued, and their conclusions 
cordially adopted, by the authors criticized, among 
whom were such masters in divers fields as the great 
naturalist Darwin and the great Latinist H. A. J. 
Munro. Sir Henry Irving, I always understood, was 
forward during Jenkin's lifetime to acknowledge the 
value of his private and published criticisms on stage- 
craft and the actor's art. The classical student who 
turns to his review of Browning's Agamemnon and 
Campbell's Trachinice in the Edinburgh Review for 
1878 * will certainly not close it without a sense of added 
insight into the spirit and conduct of the Greek drama. 
On questions of art and literature this man of science 
and of inventions was singularly well worth hearing, 
though often one-sided and dogmatic. In art he valued 

* Reprinted in Papers of Fleeming Jenkin (Longmans, 1887), 
p. 3. 



FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 157 

above all the spirit of classic grace and beauty, but was 
sometimes taken in by its counterfeit. In imaginative 
literature he cared first for the force and reality of 
the human emotions expressed, next for the structure 
and evolution of the fable, and little, comparatively, 
for matters of form and style apart from these. 

The variety and genuineness of Jenkin's intellectual 
interests proceeded in truth from the keenness and 
healthiness of his interest in life itself. Such keenness 
shone visibly from his looks, which were not handsome 
but in the highest degree animated, sparkling, and 
engaging, the very warts on his countenance seeming 
to heighten the vivacity of its expression. The 
amount of his vital energy was extraordinary, and no 
man ever took his own experience with more zest or 
entered with a readier sympathy into that of others. 
An honest blow he was always prepared to take, and 
every honest pleasure he relished with delight. He 
loved to do well all he did, and to take not only a part, 
but a lead, in bodily and other pastimes, as shooting, 
fishing, mountaineering, yachting, skating, dancing, 
acting and the rest. But in conversation and human 
intercourse lay perhaps his chief pleasure of all. His 
manly and loyal nature was at all times equally ready 
with a knock-down argument and a tear of sympathy. 
Chivalrous and tender-hearted in the extreme in all 
the real relations and probing circumstances of life, 
he was too free himself from small or morbid suscep- 
tibilities to be very sparing of them in others, and to 
those who met and talked with him for the first time 
might easily seem too trenchant in reply and too pertina- 



158 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

cious in discussion. But you soon found out that if 
he was the most unflinching of critics and disputants, 
he was also the most unfailing and ever serviceable 
of friends. Moreover, to what pleased him in your 
company or conversation he was instantly and attrac- 
tively responsive. He would eagerly watch for and 
pounce upon your remarks, and the futile or half- 
sincere among them he would toss aside with a prompt 
and wholesome contempt, his eye twinkling the while 
between humour, kindness, and annoyance ; while on 
others he would seize with gusto, and turn them 
appreciatively over and inside out until he had made 
the most of them. In my own intercourse with him, 
no subject was more frequently discussed between 
us than the social advantages and disadvantages of 
scientific and mechanical discovery. I used to speak 
with dislike of the ' progress ' and ' prosperity ' which 
cause multitudes to teem in grimy alleys where before 
a few had been scattered over wholesome fields, and 
with apprehension of the possible results of his own 
last invention on population and on scenery. He 
would thereupon assail me as a puling sentimentalist : 
I would retort on him as a materialist and Philistine. 
In the course of discussion he would be forced to admit 
that the multiplication and dissemination of the com- 
moda vitce in the modern world was attended by the 
loss of much in life and nature that appealed to the 
imagination and the sense of beauty and romance. 
But he would always fall back on his standing argument 
that life, life under any even merely endurable condi- 
tions of health, freedom, and order, was well worth 



FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 159 

living ; and that the mere increase of human beings 
capable of enjoying the rudimentary pleasures and 
fulfilling the rudimentary duties of existence was 
therefore a real and solid, even if not unmixed, good. 
Did not his charity and buoyancy of temper lead him 
here to err in judging others by himself ? If, indeed, 
any large proportion of those multitudes could be like 
him, in his untiring zest for life, for work, for truth, 
for experience, for the exercise of all family and 
human duties and benevolences, then indeed we could 
with him agree and believe that all was for the best. 
Be that as it may, his memory, as it abides with us 
after there has passed away a whole generation since 
his death, is more vivid and more inspiriting than are 
the living presences of the thinner-blooded and 
weaklier-souled majority of men. 

His wife, as I have said, survived him until but 
the other day. His intense, assiduous devotion to 
her had been one of the qualities which had most 
endeared him to his friends. She came of a notable 
legal family, the Austins of Creeting Mill in Suffolk. 
The eldest of the three distinguished Austin brothers, 
John, gained world-wide fame as a philosophical 
jurist, and with his wife, one of the Norwich Taylors, 
was for many years the centre of the most brilliant 
legal society in London : that enchanting character, 
Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, was their only child. After 
his early youth Suffolk knew John Austin no more. 
Charles, on the other hand, the second brother, who 
had been a contemporary at Cambridge of Macaulay 
and Cockburn, and one of the most dazzling of the 



160 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

brilliant group to which they belonged, after rapidly 
making an unheard-of fortune at the Parliamentary 
bar, retired early with broken health to his native 
county and lived there a life of lettered leisure, under- 
taking no duty except that of chairman of quarter 
sessions : my father knew him in that capacity as a 
matter of course, but not intimately, and taught me 
to recognize him, but no more, when we met him 
driving about the countryside. The third brother, 
Alfred Austin, also a lawyer, was a man of less shining 
but nevertheless quite effectual gifts, and after a 
succession of public services became permanent Secre- 
tary of the Office of Works. His wife belonged to the 
highly cultivated Norwich stock of the Barrons. 
Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin was the daughter of this couple, 
and in mind as in character inherited both the powers 
and the standards of the distinguished breeds front 
which she sprang. Her own special gift was for acting 
and recitation. It was only privately exercised, but 
those of us who had the privilege of seeing and hearing 
her will never forget the experience. Her features 
were not beautiful, but had a signal range and thrilling 
power of expression. In tragic and poetic parts, 
especially in those translated or adapted from the 
Greek, she showed what, as I have already hinted, 
must needs, had it been publicly displayed, have been 
recognized as genius. To hear her declaim dramatic 
verse was to enjoy that art in its very perfection. And 
her gift of dramatic gesture was not less striking. 
Recalling her, for instance, in the part of Cly temnestra, 
I can vouch for having seen on no stage anything of 



FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 161 

greater — on the English stage nothing of equal — power 
and distinction. Besides these and other figures of 
Greek tragedy, Mrs. Jenkin showed the versatility of 
her gift by playing with power and success such 
contrasted Shakespeare parts as Cleopatra, Katherine 
the shrew, Viola, Mrs. Ford, as well as, in other fields 
of drama, Griselda, Peg Woffigton, and Mrs. Mala- 
prop. Needless to say that Jenkin, who delighted 
both passionately and critically in everything his wife 
did and was, took especial pride and joy in these 
performances, and in getting them up was the most 
energetic and capable of stage managers, whether in 
the private theatre which he and his friends established 
for a while in Edinburgh (and in which the young 
Louis Stevenson occasionally bore a part), or on the 
rarer occasions when she was able to appear in London. 
Of the wise and warm and perfectly unassuming 
private virtues of this admirable woman, her tactful 
human kindnesses and assiduities, constant and unfail- 
ing until the end, among her friends and descendants, 
the present is no place to speak. The affection with 
which Stevenson never ceased to regard her, the value 
he set upon her practical wisdom and advice as well 
as the zeal with which he bent himself to carry out 
the heavy task his friendship had undertaken in writing 
her husband's life — all these things are made manifest 
both in that Life itself and in his published letters 
written to her during his invalid years at Bournemouth. 



CHAPTER X 

BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 

Every Londoner knows Box Hill near Dorking, with 
its open crest and wide prospects and steep chalky 
declivities and gullies thicketed with juniper and box- 
wood. Through a fine act of private generosity, the 
crest, with its slopes and approaches from the high 
road and from the south-west, has now become the 
property of the National Trust and so been saved to 
the public in perpetuity, while some of the adjacent 
and no less attractive open country has, even as I 
write, been thrown into the market and is in danger 
of being parcelled out for building. It is true that 
of the ground now its own the public sometimes makes 
an irritating enough use, especially that portion of the 
public which regales itself on the open hill instead of 
at the inn below, and litters all the slopes and hollows 
with the wrappings and relics of its provender. 
Fortunately, no amount of Cockney frequentation 
can cancel or much disturb the inveterate associa- 
tions of the scene with classical works and classical 
figures of English literature. Moreover, there are 
plenty of hours when those associations can still be 
conjured up and those memories enjoyed in quiet. It 
is six years and more since I chanced to spend the 

162 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 163 

evening of a chill autumnal day wandering alone 
about those familiar and haunted slopes. The weather 
had just cleared after storm : above the steep shoulder 
of the down a perfect half -moon hung in a sky of faint 
lilac melting into pure pearl-green : the darkened 
valley woods were of a deep misty brown touched 
here and there almost into crimson by the last lingering 
flames of autumn : the hills closing the valley south- 
westward stood purple and translucent like amethyst. 
The rich, solemnly glowing colours of the scene, with 
the tingling chill of the season, sent a thrill through 
my blood and nerves intensifying the memories and 
associations of the place almost into actual presences, 
hauntings with which the very air seemed to vibrate. 
The earliest of such memories and associations per- 
sonal to myself had been from days of my own later 
boyhood, when I used often to visit a family of girl- 
cousins who had their home in the valley a mile or 
two away towards Leatherhead, and for one of whom 
I cherished a mute and cubbish adoration. Other 
images, from fiction and from real life alternately, the 
one not less vivid than the other, rose and thrust them- 
selves crowdingly upon my mind's eye. Had not 
Jane Austen made a certain imagined picnic on the 
site for ever memorable by the misbehaviour of her 
dear, her fascinating and fastidious, too-confident and 
too-managing Emma Woodhouse, whose cleverness 
led her into more blunders than a duller person could 
have committed, and who on the day of that picnic 
made poor Jane Fairfax so dreadfully unhappy by her 
flirtation with Frank Churchill ? Looking across the 



164 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

valley to the great park of Norbury or the more modest 
grounds of Camilla Lacey, did not the figure of the real 
and charming Fanny Burney, with her novels and her 
diaries and her friends, her marriage and married life 
with the most irreproachably correct of French noble- 
men in exile, rise up to occupy and animate the scene ? 
For a crisis of human interest in a contrasted kind, 
a crowning moment in a red-blooded historic tale of 
passion and heroism and beauty, was it not here that 
Nelson and Emma Hamilton met and parted for the 
last time ? Was it not here again that Keats, living 
for some late autumn weeks at the Burford Bridge Inn, 
finished the last five hundred lines of Endymion, was 
drawn by the spell of moonlight (" ' you a' seen the 
moon ? ' ") up the hill at evening, wrote the famous 
" drear-nighted December " song, and poured out in 
letters to his friends his half-formed, none the less 
illuminating guesses on the relations of imagination 
to ultimate truth ? 

It was in the late autumn of 1867, almost exactly 
half a century after Keats' s stay at Burford Bridge, that 
George Meredith fixed his home at Flint Cottage a 
quarter of a mile away. The association with Keats, 
it may be noted, was one of the attractions the place 
presented to him. In the first letter I had from him 
inviting me there, he writes of it as a place where 
Keats " did abide for a while, between one poem and 
another, conceiving, as I have fancied, a spot ' where 
damp moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange 
over-growth.' " This is a mistake. Beside the banks 
of that sluggish, eccentric river the Mole, with its 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 165 

habit of diving and disappearing altogether at certain 
places in the summer heats, there may for aught I 
know be plashy places fitted to suggest these lines to 
Keats. But as a matter of fact the hymn to Pan, 
where they occur, had been written before ever he came 
to those parts, in Thanet or perhaps at Canterbury. 
My own conviction is that he had conceived the lines 
earlier yet, and that they had been suggested by one 
of the Hampstead ponds which he had to pass on his 
walks between Leigh Hunt's lodgings in the Vale of 
Health and his brothers' quarters in the Poultry. 
Even now, when the ponds are much better kept and 
the ground about them better drained than is recorded 
to have been then the case, this one is partly fringed, 
as the others are not, with a belt of rushes among 
which great plants of hemlock may be seen bearing 
their blooms in early summer. 

But to return to Meredith — before settling at Flint 
Cottage he knew the neighbourhood well. He had 
lived for some years of his early youth near Weybridge, 
later for several more years near Esher, and mighty 
walker as he was, had in tramps at all hours of the day 
and night — by predilection round about the hour of 
dawn — come to know all the stretches of chalk down 
or heather, all the valleys and water-meadows and 
steep woodlands, the roads and farm tracks and foot- 
ways, of mid-Surrey, and the men and creatures fre- 
quenting them, with a familiarity such as scarcely 
any other man has possessed, a poet's intimacy at once 
ardently imaginative and minutely observant. Within 
a month or two after his settling into Flint Cottage he 



166 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

writes to a friend : " Who could help flourishing here ? 
I am every morning on the top of Box Hill — as its 
flower, its bird, its prophet. I drop down the moon 
on one side, I draw up the sun on t'other. I breathe 
fine air. I shout ha ha to the gates of the world. 
Then I descend, and know myself a donkey for doing 
it." It was here, either in the cottage itself or in the 
two-roomed chalet which he afterwards built in an 
upper corner of his garden, and from the windows of 
which, as he has told us, he loved to welcome the 
thrushes when they came in February to flute their 
prelude to the nightingales of April — it was here that 
he wrote the whole succession of his middle and later 
novels : Harry Richmond and Beauchamp's Career 
and The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways and 
One of our Conquerors and Lord Ormont and The 
Amazing Marriage ; here also all his middle and 
later poetry : Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, 
Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, A Reading of 
Earth, A Reading of Life, and the rest. More in- 
cessant and strenuous labour of brain and heart 
together than those titles signify is hardly recorded 
of any man. During the first fifteen or more of this 
period of forty years neither his novels nor his poetry 
had any success with the public. Outside a narrow 
circle of friends and admirers he had few readers and 
none but harsh critics, and frugal as he was, had to 
live not by the exercise of his genius but by hack-work 
as a journalist and publisher's reader. But the 
friends were staunch and the admirers keen : and the 
cottage at Box Hill was well frequented by an intim- 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 167 

ate circle of those who appreciated both the man and 
his work. Some men are repelled, others attracted, 
by a personality more powerful and shining than their 
own. To those whom such a personality attracts, 
Meredith's physical activity, strength, and beauty, the 
exuberance and authority of his talk, with its singular 
blend of elaborate high courtesy and unsparing raillery, 
its brusque transitions from grave wisdom to riotous 
hyperbolical laughter, his eager interest in all phases 
of life, literature and politics, his staunchness, and at 
the same time sensitiveness, in friendship, his genial 
yet fastidious conviviality, made him the most im- 
pressive and stimulating of companions. 

It was not until 1878 that I first met him, and then 
only to shake hands on the introduction of Louis 
Stevenson. Stevenson was staying at the Burford 
Bridge Inn with his parents, busy upon the early part 
of his New Arabian Nights (the Suicide Club chapters), 
and finding himself thus almost at Meredith's door, had 
sought leave, sensitively and shyly, not without fear 
of a rebuff, to pay him the homage of a beginner to a 
master. The two had common friends in a young 
couple then living at Pixholme close by, the Jim 
Gordons,* and in their garden Meredith and Stevenson 
were invited to meet. Stevenson, who could be as 
engaging in deference as he was brilliant and stimu- 
lating in challenge, soon completely won the affection 
of his senior, and their meetings were renewed almost 

* Mrs. Gordon, wee Alice Brandreth, is now the wife of Sir John 
George Butcher, Bart., M.P. for the City of York. See her volume, 
Memories of George Meredith, O.M. : Constable & Co., 1919. 



168 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

daily for several weeks. One afternoon during those 
weeks, having gone down to Box Hill to see Stevenson 
and the Gordons, I remember being introduced to 
Meredith across a stile or field gate to which he had 
come up in company with the two Stevensons, Louis 
and Bob, at the end of a twelve-mile walk ; a thing of 
which Louis was well capable in those days, before his 
journey to California, but never afterwards. Steven- 
son was there again with his wife in 1881 and 1882, and 
for the last time in August 1886, a year before he left 
England never to return. When Meredith first planned 
his novel, The Amazing Marriage, he meant to make 
one of his characters, Gower Woodseer, in some measure 
a portrait of R. L. S., but changed his purpose in the 
execution, and scarce a trace of likeness remains. 

There was something about Burford Bridge and its 
neighbourhood, apart from the attraction of Meredith's 
company, which drew Stevenson for its own sake and 
set his imagination working. His " Suicide Club " 
stories, though written there, had of course nothing 
to do with the sentiment of the scene : they had been 
conceived in nocturnal prowls about London. But 
some years later Stevenson coupled the Burford Bridge 
Inn with the Hawes Inn at Queen's Ferry on the Forth 
as a place made for adventure and thrilling with 
suggestions of potential romance. His words are 
well known : — " I have lived both at the Hawes and 
Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, 
of some adventure that should justify the place ; but 
though the feeling had me to bed at night and called 
me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 169 

and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. 
The man or the hour had not yet come ; but some 
day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, 
fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night 
a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip 
upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford." The 
hope was realized as to Queen's Ferry, but never as 
to Burford Bridge. I imagine the attempt would 
have been made in connection with his projected tale, 
Jerry Abershaw, at one time eagerly planned but 
never brought even so far into being as that other 
highway story, The Great North Road, which remains 
so tantalizing a fragment in his work. But to return 
to his special relations with Meredith — of all the elder 
master's letters, none perhaps is more characteristic 
than that which he wrote to R. L. S. on the publication 
of his first book, The Inland Voyage. I give only the 
critical paragraphs of the letter, which has been 
printed in full in Mr. W. Meredith's two-volume 
edition of his father's correspondence. 

" I have been fully pleased. The writing is of the rare kind 
which is naturally simple yet picked and choice. It is literature. 
The eye on land and people embraces both, and does not take 
them up in bits. I have returned to the reading and shall again. 
The reflections wisely tickle, they are in the right good tone of 
philosophy interwrought with humour. 

"My protest is against the Preface and the final page. The 
Preface is keenly in Osric's vein — ' everything you will, dear worthy 
public, but we are exceedingly modest and doubt an you will read 
us, though exquisitely silken-calved we are, and could say a word 
of ourselves, yet on seeing our book, were we amazed at our little- 
ness indeed and truly, my lord Public ! ' As for the closing page 



170 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

it is rank recreancy. ' Yes, Mr. Barlow,' said Tommy, * I have 
travelled abroad, under various mishaps, to learn in the end that 
the rarest adventures are those one does not go forth to seek.' 
' My very words to him,' said Mr. Barlow to himself, at the same 
time presenting Tommy with a guinea piece. — This last page is 
quite out of tone with the spirit of the book. 

" I remember ' On the Oise,' you speak of the river hurrying 
on, ' never pausing to take breath.' This, and a touch of excess 
in dealing with the reeds, whom you deprive of their beauty by 
overinforming them with your sensations, I feel painfully to be 
levelled at the Saxon head. It is in the style of Dickens." 

Coming from a ripe to a budding genius, from a man 
of fifty to one of twenty-eight, could praise and admoni- 
tion, encouragement and a touch of satire, be blended 
more wisely and adroitly ? Or could any words bear 
more sharply the characteristic Meredithian mint- 
mark ? To us who knew him the second paragraph 
in particular carries a quintessential flavour of the 
man. Those bits of parody in the styles of Osric and 
of Sandford and Merton — how many afternoons of 
rich hour-long talk do they recall, when the master, 
walking in the garden or on the hill-side with friends, 
would stop and lean back against his stick and fall 
to teasing one or the other of us by imputing to him 
all manner of absurd adventures and parts in imagin- 
ary conversations. He would begin quietly and 
plausibly, until by and by his invention, taking wing, 
would soar as it were in ascending spirals into a bur- 
lesque empyrean where it would sustain itself unflag- 
gingly, not without a penetrating shaft aimed from 
time to time at the true character and weaknesses of 
the person parodied. The most characteristic strain 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 171 

in his ordinary manner was this blend of the most 
scrupulous courtesy with the frankest raillery, both 
somewhat elaborate in their kind. He would take 
and keep the same tone with servants, whom it mysti- 
fied beyond measure but none the less delighted, and 
who adored him. (I am thinking naturally and in 
especial of the invaluable man-of -all- work, Cole.) He 
would even take it with his pet dogs. I have noticed 
that the dogs of men of genius love them more passion- 
ately and devotedly than they love ordinary masters, 
I suppose feeling in them some extra glow and intensity 
of the emotional faculties calling for a response in 
kind. To the succession of black and tan or pure tan 
dachshunds given to Meredith by various friends, 
Koby and Bruny and Pete (for * Kobold,' ' Bruno,' 
1 Peto '), and Islet, on whom he wrote his well-known 
elegy — to these it was a delight to hear him talking 
eagerly by the half hour together in terms now of caress- 
ing endearment, now of irony, or sometimes, when 
the poaching instinct had proved too strong in any of 
them, of pained parental reproof. 

Divers common friends have assured me, and I can 
easily believe, that the master was never more himself 
than when he occasionally received on their Sunday 
afternoon peregrinations the company of walkers 
whom Leslie Stephen had organized under the name of 
the Sunday Tramps. None but the youngest of my 
readers will need telling how Stephen excelled no less 
as an athletic walker and mountaineer than as a 
masterly critic, editor, and biographer : " long Leslie 
Stephen," as we used commonly to call him, for long 



172 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

he was alike of back, leg, and stride, of nose and of 
beard (the fine forked and flowing auburn beard 
depicted in Watts's well-known portrait). He had no 
small talk, and to strangers or ordinary acquaintances 
was apt to seem a character even sardonically dry and 
shy. But no man had a greater power of winning 
the love of those to whom he felt himself drawn. He 
had for wife first one of the most delightful of women, 
and after her death another who was also one of the 
most beautiful, and for devoted men-friends a pick of 
the choicest spirits of his time, both English and 
American. Of these friends Meredith was one of the 
closest, and in the character of Vernon Whitford in 
The Egoist has turned the intimacy to living literary 
account. He was never one of Stephen's troop of 
Tramps himself, but his cottage was pretty often made 
a starting-point or resting-point for their outings.* 
Not long after the society was founded, which was in 
1879, his own walking powers began little by little to 
fail. For the first few years he would go a good part 
of the day's walk with them, then gradually not for 
more than a mile or two ; but as long as their little 
society lasted he used to receive them into his cottage 
and hold forth among them, I am told, at his best. 

As regards my own relations with Meredith, I have 
told how I shook hands with him across a stile in 1878. 
But my intimacy did not begin till after the death of 
his second wife in 1885 and my own removal from my 
previous headquarters at Cambridge to take up work 

* For a full account of the Tramps, see F. W. Maitland, The 
Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, Duckworth, 1907. 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 173 

at the British Museum. The days of his neglect were 
then passing away. After the publication of The 
Egoist and Diana of the Grossways critics like Stevenson 
and Henley, with their zeal and energy and power 
of making themselves heard, had forced Meredith 
afresh upon the attention both of his own contem- 
poraries and theirs. A still younger generation needed 
no convincing ; American appreciation quickly fol- 
lowed ; and so by degrees the enthusiasm of the few 
succeeded in making admiration for him a fashion 
with the many. At the same time his bodily, though 
not his intellectual, vigour was beginning by gradual 
degrees to flag. The reddish brown had quite faded 
from his hair and given place to the shade between 
grizzled and silvery that went so well with his habitual, 
unvarying suit of warm light-grey set off by a bright 
scarlet tie. But both of hair and beard the crop was 
as rich and wavy as ever ; and the features retained 
unimpaired alike their fine cutting and their firm 
resolute air. His voice had not at all lost — indeed it 
never lost — its strong virile timbre, nor his utterance 
its authoritative rotundity and fulness ; for his speech 
was ever clear-cut and complete, and the fashion, 
growing, I fear, in our modern English conversation 
of lazily mumbling and muttering at one another from 
behind our teeth slurred, half-articulate sounds instead 
of formed words, had no countenance from him. The 
range of his walks was beginning to be much narrowed, 
but he could still breast gallantly the hill that rises 
from just outside his garden gate, and it was only by 
slow degrees that the symptoms developed themselves 



174 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

of that malady which was to cripple his lower limbs 
entirely some years before the end. 

From the twenty years of his later life during which 
Meredith used to make me welcome whenever I liked 
to come, what have I chiefly to recall ? Well, I never 
attempted, even mentally, to Boswellize him. Remem- 
ber, moreover, that to make the one and only Boswell 
it took the one and only Johnson : the talker of all 
talkers most accustomed to deliver himself in brief, 
conclusive, as it were portable sentences, each remem- 
berably laying down — say rather hammering down— 
the law on this or that question of life or conduct or 
opinion. Meredith was fond, as all his readers know, of 
composing condensed oracular aphorisms such as those 
of the Pilgrim's Scrip in Richard Fever el : but these 
were literary products, the fruits of hard meditation 
during solitary walks or in his study. Several writers 
of recollections have set down memories of his talk 
when he delivered himself more or less in the same 
vein orally. But to my mind he was never in that vein 
his best self. His best and most characteristic talk 
was above all things spontaneous, abundant, inventive, 
leaping and flinging itself from idea to idea and from 
clause to clause. The more overpowering of his 
monologues sprang sometimes from the mere overflow 
of animal and intellectual spirits. Sometimes, before 
a mixed company which included strangers, I fear 
it must be owned that they gave an impression of pro- 
ceeding from a desire to show off and play fireworks. 
I do not think that impression was quite just. The 
truth is that Meredith cherished an ideal of what the 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 175 

brilliance of everyday social intercourse ought to be 
which corresponded not at all to the capacities of 
ordinary persons but to the quite abnormal and super- 
athletic activities of his own brains. He never fully real- 
ized the difference between his own intellect and those 
of average people. In his novels he will often make 
characters described as ordinary talk like himself, and 
they, being his creations, can only do as he bids them. 
But when in real life he would sometimes try to lift 
the talk of a commonplace company to his own plane, 
the result was apt to be that he would be left discours- 
ing alone to auditors silent and gaping, disconcerted 
or perhaps even annoyed. Among those who knew 
him well and could play up to him a similar strain of 
talk went better. I have told how one of his favourite 
diversions, when there were three or four friends, men 
or women, or both, gathered about him, was to begin 
bantering one of them for the entertainment of the 
rest. Vanity might suffer under the play : indeed 
vanity was never much at ease in Meredith's company. 
To give any sign of pique or resentment was fatal. 
Little mercy would then be shown you : the only 
safe course was to go all the way with him, to enter 
into the spirit of his inventions and if possible burlesque 
his burlesque, when he would be delighted with you and 
himself, and throw back his beautiful head, and crow 
with his great manly laugh, and prolong the talk in 
high good humour, descending by easy degrees into 
the vein of genial and equal companionship. 

He loved argument, and would sometimes challenge 
and dispute for the mere sake of disputation and 



176 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

mental exercise. I remember one rather specially 
striking case in point from my own intercourse with 
him. I had broken out vehemently on the impossi- 
bility of enjoying wild scenery in the company of a 
miscellaneous crowd of tourists. He at once fell upon 
me fiercely for the sin of selfish exclusiveness and 
fancied superiority to fellow-beings as good as myself. 
I stood my ground and pushed him with questions : 
whether in point of fact the spiritual and imaginative 
effect of a certain class of scenes did not depend essen- 
tially on their being visited in solitude or in the chosen 
company of one or two : whether, for instance, the 
shores of a remote Highland loch could speak to one, 
when a rackety packetful of MacBrayne's trippers 
had just been dumped upon them from an excursion 
steamer, as they spoke to one when one was alone : 
whether, if he himself went to one of his old haunts 
in Switzerland or Tyrol and found a huge new block 
of hotel building disfiguring the scene at its most 
sensitive point, and pouring forth its crowd of cosmo- 
politan chatterers and loungers, he would not turn 
away in disappointment : whether, in fine, it was not 
one of the standing contrarieties of things, proving 
no good to be without its evil, that the modern poetic 
and romantic love of — or let us say rather fashion for 
— wild scenes and solitudes should have had, oftener 
than not, now that it has been turned to profitable 
account by hotel speculators and advertisers, the prac- 
tical effect of robbing the scenes of their wildness and 
the solitudes of their power upon the soul. In such 
discussions he would not usually be overbearing or 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 177 

unreasonable, or use his resources merely to crush or 
bemock one, and I remember that on this occasion I 
got him to something almost like a half-way agreement. 
It has been borne in upon me since that he must 
have been from the beginning arguing chiefly for 
argument's sake, for I find among his published letters 
one to the Press against a proposed extension railway 
to Ambleside in the Lake Country ; and in this he 
takes, not less effectively than decisively, exactly the 
same line as I had found myself taking against him 
in talk as above related : — 

Where there is dissension between rich and poor, I do not 
commonly side with the former. I am against the project because 
it does not promise to be of good use to the people. . . . We have 
here one of the few instances of Sentimentalists pleading for the 
general interests, Conservatives upholding the cause of Democrats. 
I suppose that an Ambleside railway would offer a paying invest- 
ment to the Shareholder ; it would fatten some publican ; and 
it would spare the excursionist that exercise of his legs and chest 
which it is beneficial for him to take. ... It cannot be thought 
that Englishmen will allow their one recreative holiday ground of 
high hill and deep dale (I would add " consecrated by one of our 
noblest poets," but that I am on my guard against treating the 
subject emotionally) to be a place of no retreat. They must have 
ceased to discern the quality of true utility if they permit it. 
Spiritual beauty serves us to the full as much as material force, 
and it must have its homes of seclusion to live. We must guard 
it to keep it. 

It must not be supposed from what I have said that 
either badinage and satire, or disputation for disputa- 
tion's sake, were at all times elements in Meredith's 
conversation. No reader of his novels but must have 



178 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

been impressed by the contrast between the incessant 
elaborate fireworks of wit (wit surely degenerating 
too often into tiresome intellectual foppery and show- 
off ?) in which his characters are made to indulge in 
their lighter moments and the straightforward intensity 
of feeling and utterance — utterance lucid however 
packed and pregnant — commonly assigned to them in 
crucial moments of passion. A somewhat similar 
contrast marked, in my experience, their author's 
show conversation in mixed company and his intimate 
talk in the privacy of friendship. No man could be 
more gravely or more sagaciously sympathetic when 
the appeal for sympathy was made, or could put more 
of bracing life- wisdom into advice on matters of con- 
duct when his advice was sought. To women (at 
least to the right kind of women, for with sentimental- 
ists or self -flatterers of either sex he had small patience) 
he could be the most chivalrous-hearted and tenderly 
understanding and honourably helpful of men, as 
beseemed the creator of Lucy Feverel and Hose 
Jocelyn and Renee and Clara Middleton, of Rhoda 
and Dahlia and Diana and the rest : his temper and 
discourse in these respects being in life and in literature 
entirely and admirably the same. In tete-d-tete inter- 
course he rarely, in my experience, mounted the high 
intellectual or fantastic stilts, but would enter simply, 
with the power and incisiveness of a master but on 
perfectly free and equal terms, on almost any subject 
of human or historical or literary discussion. 

A very frequent subject of talk between us was on 
the duty and necessity for England of the obligation 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 179 

to national service. He conceived military training 
to be a thing desirable in every state, desirable for 
the sake of the manhood, the self-respect, the physical 
and moral health of its citizens, and desirable for our- 
selves above all peoples. He held that if our popula- 
tion would not shake off its carelessness and sloth, 
born of plethora, and submit to that discipline, as 
well as to other wholesome disciplines of mind and 
body, our day was done. He believed that a more 
sternly trained race like the Germans would surely 
win against us and deserve to win. These convictions 
at the same time did not shake his attachment to the 
Liberal/party in the state, which almost to a man was 
fanatically opposed to them. When I urged that he 
should strive to convert his political friends and should 
in writing declare his mind on the question in terms 
more calculated to strike home than the cryptic utter- 
ances which he puts into the mouths of a Colney 
Durance or a Simeon Fenellan, he was apt to answer 
as though the matter were one which concerned him 
not as one of ourselves, but only as a critic and onlooker. 
In discussions on England and her character and 
destinies he would always separate himself from his 
countrymen and say " You English." This attitude 
seemed to me to be due partly to a cherished conscious- 
ness of, or at all events belief in, his own purely Celtic 
blood (his father having been Welsh and his mother 
Irish), partly to the sense of alienation from the sym- 
pathies of his countrymen which had been forced on 
his proud and sensitive nature by their long neglect 
of his work. Dearly as he loved, and deeply beyond all 



180 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

men as he knew, the English soil, he would sometimes 
inveigh against defects of the English mind and char- 
acter in the tone not only of a detached stranger but 
almost of an enemy. This from such a man, by that 
time at any rate recognized as one of the glories of our 
age and country, was a thing that I used sometimes to 
find hard to bear. The true key to his mind in the 
matter is perhaps to be found in his words written in 
1870 : "I am neither German nor French, nor, 
unless the nation is attacked, English. I am European 
and Cosmopolitan — for humanity ! The nation which 
shows most worth is the nation I love and reverence." 
Nearly thirty years later, in one of his very last letters, 
he writes : "As to our country, if the people were 
awake, they would submit to be drilled. . . . The 
fear of imposing drill for at least a year seems to me a 
forecast of the national tragedy." Conceive what 
would have been his scorn for those who shrieked 
against the duty of imposing national service even 
after the outbreak of the world war, during those 
months of deadly peril to all that England stands for 
and holds dear. But what I like better to conceive is 
the conversion he must needs have undergone had he 
lived to see his own critical and contemptuous mis- 
givings on England's account belied when the day of 
trial came — to see her thrust her own currish coun- 
sellors aside and shoulder valiantly and in the end 
victoriously the tremendous duties of the time. 

Most of Meredith's friends and admirers cared much 
more, at least during his life-time, for his novels than 
for his poems. I think one of the things which made 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 181 

him tolerate my company was the interest, puzzled 
and fretted interest though it often was, which I took 
in his poetry. Very much of this had always repelled 
me by its obscurity : but among the rest, the things 
relatively clear, there were some that seemed to me 
in various kinds unsurpassed, as in the simple lyric 
kind The Sweet o' the Year and Autumn Even Song; 
in more strenuous and ambitious kinds Melampus ; 
Earth and a Wedded Woman ; Love in the Valley, surely 
as rich and original a love-lyric, or lyric and idyll in 
one, as was ever written. Equally pre-eminent among 
lyrics political seemed to me the ode On France written 
after her overthrow in 1870 and foretelling for her 
much such a resurrection as we afterwards witnessed. 
I was proportionately disappointed at the difficulty 
with which I found myself trying to follow the odes 
On Napoleon and On French History when he read 
them to me, then fresh written, in 1898. His tones in 
reading were resonant and masterful as I have said, 
but withal level and not much modulated or varied so 
as to help the sense ; and in poems so close-packed 
and complicated in construction, so dense with thought 
and imagery as these, the full meaning of what he read 
was naturally hard to seize. As a rule he courted no 
criticism and allowed for no difficulty ; but one day 
I remember that he was more indulgent than usual. 
He paused to say how he knew some people found his 
poetry obscure, and to ask whether I did, and where, 
and why ? I tried to point out some puzzles in his 
printed poems which I had quite failed to solve, even 
with the page before me and full leisure to study it. 



182 MEMOEIES AND NOTES 

He was patient, but simply could not see that they 
were puzzles at all, and closed the talk characteristic- 
ally with a jolly laugh over the sluggishness of my 
Saxon wits. In the course of it, defining his own aims 
and ideals in verse, he repeated several times with 
insistence, " Concentration and suggestion, Colvin, 
concentration and suggestion, those are the things I 
care for and am always trying for in poetry." It 
was a misfortune, I think, for his art, and probably 
for his hold of posterity, that theory should thus have 
come to reinforce and exaggerate habits of thought 
and style to which he was only too prone by instinct.* 
But my frank admission of not being always able to 
follow him did not disgust him with me as a hearer. 

* I borrowed this phrase of the master's for the title of a lecture, 
since printed as a pamphlet of the English Association (No. 32, 
1915), in which I tried to define and illustrate various special modes 
of concentration and suggestion characteristic of some of our chief 
poets. And I indicated the higher rank to be assigned, as I think, 
to that mode in which not intellect but imagination plays the chief 
part ; not intellect, ever challenging the mind to a wrestle among 
the problems and complexities of things, but imagination, which 
strikes into the heart of things an effortless and instantaneous 
light. Shakespeare is the greatest master in both modes. In the 
work of poets like Donne, Browning, Meredith, the intellectual 
mode of concentration and suggestion predominates : in that of 
Meredith to a degree which repels many readers and annoys them. 
But it is clear that what repels and annoys one class of mind attracts 
and stimulates another ; witness Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's interesting 
volume, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, in which 
he seems to show that what has chiefly drawn him to the author's 
work is its continual athletic play of wit and challenge to mental 
effort in the reader. 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 183 

Just before Christmas, 1889, I had the following letter 
from him : — 

My dear Colvin, — 

I don't like the account you give of yourself, and shall be glad 
to hear when you can take a day and night here with me. I will 
read you some hexameters — a version of the passages of the Iliad 
best known — sounding to me somewhat of the sea, a poor shell, 
but suggesting Homer. Please tell your American that I am 
rarely in town, but that if he will come to me any day this week, 
he will find me here, happy to entertain him at dinner. Say it, 
using the phrases. He has but to write to me, naming his day. — 
Browning's death grieved and disconcerted me. I placed reliance 
on his active strength. — But, as to all old men Juvenal's X is right 
absolutely. Loss of friends gives us our poena diu viventibus. 

Yours ever, 

George Meredith. 

I went and can remember as though it were yesterday 
his reading, with his strong, masculine, authoritative 
voice and rotund, precise enunciation : on the other 
hand, I have quite forgotten to what visitor from 
America his message of courtesy was directed. He 
read that day not only from his recent translations in 
the Homeric hexameter, but from a much earlier 
attempt at original writing in the more complicated 
" Galliambic " metre of Catullus's Atys. Once granted 
(a large concession) that the English accentual stress is 
in any true sense a metrical equivalent for the Greek 
or Latin quantity, I think Meredith's experiments in 
the classical metres are as successful as anyone's, 
though often, it must be admitted, at the cost of 
strained style and wretched construction. Here are 



184 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

two of the passages from that day's reading which I 
find sticking closest to me in memory, partly I suppose 
because they ran more naturally and straightforwardly 
than most, partly by reason of the rousing and thrilling 
sonority with which he declaimed them. From the 
Iliad, Book XIV:— 

Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle, 
Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the 

Northwind ; 
Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing, 
Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a 

woodland ; 
Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the 

oak-trees' 
Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost ; 
As rose then stupendous the Trojans' cry and Achaians', 
Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the 

conflict. 

From his own Phaeton : 

All the end foreseeing, Phoebus to his oath irrevocable 

Bowed obedient, deploring the insanity pitiless. 

Then the flame-outsnorting horses were led forth : it was so 

decreed. 
They were yoked before the glad youth by his sister-ancillaries. 
Swift the ripple ripples follow'd, as of aureate Helicon, 
Down their flanks, while they impatient pawed desire of the 

distances, 
And the bit with fury champed. Oh ! unimaginable delight ! 
Unimagined speed and splendour in the circle of upper air ! 
Glory grander than the armed host upon earth singing victory ! 

The Juvenal reference in the letter above quoted is 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 185 

of course to the famous passage in the tenth satire,* on 
The Vanity of Human Wishes (to adopt Johnson's 
title for it), where in reciting the penalties of prolonged 
age the satirist rises for the nonce into a strain of 
sombre magnificence second only, if second, to certain 

* Ut vigeant sensus animi, ducenda tamen sunt 
Funera natorum, rogus aspiciendus amatse 
Conjugis et fratris plenseque sororibus urnaB. 
Hsec data poena diu viventibus, ut renovata 
Semper clade domus multis in luctibus inque 
Perpetuo mcerore et nigra veste senescunt, etc., etc. 
Thus diluted by Johnson (whom one does not commonly think 
of as a diluter) in lines of The Vanity of Human Wishes, some of 
which have become proverbial : — 

But grant, the virtues of a temp'rate prime 
Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime ; 
An age that melts with unperceiv'd decay, 
And glides in modest innocence away ; 
Whose peaceful day Benevolence endears, 
Whose night congratulating Conscience cheers ; 
The gen'ral fav'rite as the gen'ral friend : 
Such age there is, and who shall wish its end ? 

Yet ev'n on this her load Misfortune flings, 
To press the weary minutes' flagging wings ; 
New sorrow rises as the day returns, 
A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns. 
Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier, 
Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear ; 
Year chases year, decay pursues decay, 
Still drops some joy from with 'ring life away; 
New forms arise, and diff'rent views engage, 
Superfluous lags the vet 'ran on the stage, 
Till pitying Nature signs the last release, 
And bids afflicted worth retire to peace. 



186 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

kindred passages in Lucretius. The mood here ex- 
pressed was in Meredith quite exceptional. He had 
his dark hours, but was the last man to think tragically 
or indignantly of the common processes and ordinances 
of nature, as Juvenal makes us feel that he thought 
of them even while he exhorts men to submission and 
moderation of inordinate desires. Meredith's com- 
plaint is never against nature, but against the spirit in 
man which misreads her laws and murmurs at them. 
Acquiescence, unembittered acquiescence, was his 
doctrine ; it was also, both by instinct and discipline, 
his practice. He lived after this for twenty honoured 
years, and suffered more than his share of physical 
pain and infirmity. As disabilities grew on him, (it is 
true they hardly at all impaired the energies of his 
mind,) he bore them with constancy and cheerfulness, 
mellowing and growing the while in gentleness and in 
power of sympathy with other and younger minds. 

For some years before the end he had become quite 
incapable of walking and received his friends as a 
prisoner and a fixture to his armchair. He grew deaf 
and gradually deafer, so that to contribute any share 
of one's own to the talk became an effort, and one had 
more and more to be content with trying to convey 
to his hearing some suggestion that should stimulate 
him to monologue. But the intellect remained quite 
undimmed, the spirit quite unquenchable : his thirst 
for reading, and especially for French historical and 
biographical reading, abated not a jot : his interest in 
politics and literature and persons, the work of his 
contemporaries and the promise of his juniors, remained 



BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 187 

as keen as ever. When one succeeded in drawing a 
monologue it would sometimes be almost as brilliant 
and well-sustained as those of earlier days. For two 
years I had for one reason or another failed to see 
him, when one day in the mid-spring of 1909 came the 
news of his serious illness, and almost immediately 
afterwards of his death. It was on a radiant May 
day, a day of summer rather than spring, that a little 
company of us, his friends, assembled by his cottage 
gate and followed his remains to the grave chosen 
for them in Dorking churchyard. That at least is the 
material account and external semblance of what 
happened. What truly, to the inward and spiritual 
sense, happened on that day has been told by the most 
devoted of his younger friends, Sir James Barrie, in 
words perhaps as moving as were ever written by 
one man of letters about another. When the coaches 
were gone, the cottage, to the unsealed vision, was 
according to Barrie not deserted. There still sat in his 
chair, as of yore, an old man, but presently his old age 
fell away from him (" for this is what is meant by 
Death to such as he "). He rose and went through the 
door into the garden, where he found all the men and 
women of his creation drawn up to salute and do him 
reverence : thence up the garden walks— 

" to the chalet where he worked, and good and brave men will 
for ever bow proudly before it, but good and brave women will 
bow more proudly still. He went there only because he had gone 
so often, and this time the door was locked ; he did not know why 
nor care. He came swinging down the path, singing lustily, and 
calling to his dogs, his dogs of the present and the past ; and they 



188 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

yelped with joy, for they knew they were once again to breast the 
hill with him. 

" He strode up the hill whirling his staff, for which he had no 
longer any other use. His hearing was again so acute that from 
far away on the Dorking road he could hear the rumbling of a 
coach. It had been disputed whether he should be buried in 
Westminster Abbey or in a quiet churchyard, and there came to 
him somehow a knowledge (it was the last he ever knew of little 
things) that people had been at variance as to whether a casket 
of dust should be laid away in one hole or in another, and he flung 
back his head with the old glorious action, and laughed a laugh 
' broad as a thousand beeves at pasture.' 

" Box Hill was no longer deserted. When a great man dies — 
and this was one of the greatest since Shakespeare — the immortals 
await him at the top of the nearest hill. He looked up and saw his 
peers. They were all young, like himself. He waved the staff in 
greeting. One, a mere stripling, ' slight unspeakably,' R. L. S., 
detached himself from the others, crying gloriously, ' Here's the 
fellow I have been telling you about ! ' and ran down the hill to 
be the first to take his Master's hand. In the meanwhile an empty 
coach was rolling on to Dorking." 



CHAPTER XI 

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 

Probably there never lived in any community an 
individual man the sense of whose existence was more 
constantly and forcibly present to the general mind 
than was that of Mr. Gladstone to the English mind 
during the prolonged plenitude of his powers. It 
was not merely the energies he displayed and the 
victories he achieved in legislative and administrative 
spheres that thus occupied the public consciousness. 
It was the sense of his being a great and pre-eminent 
personality, possessing in a singular degree that 
heightened intensity of being, that mysterious quality, 
as undefinable as it is unmistakable, to which we give 
the name of genius. To give instances of the com- 
mand he exercised over assemblies whether popular 
or deliberative, would be to waste words ; the history 
of his time and country, the memories of the surviving 
thousands of those who heard him, are full of them. 
Acknowledgment of his personal pre-eminence and 
magnetism, of the effluence from him of forces both 
spiritual and physical exceeding those of other men, 
imposed itself independently of any belief in the wisdom 
of his words or in the righteousness of the causes 
which he pleaded, although his own always fervent 

189 



190 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

conviction of such wisdom and righteousness no doubt 
contributed to the impression made. It was possible 
to come away from listening to any of his great efforts 
on the affairs of the Near East or of Ireland, or on 
domestic reform or any disputable matter whatever, 
a still unconverted opponent, but not a whit the less 
thrilled and spell-bound. The spare, erect, com- 
manding figure, the grandly modelled and deeply 
furrowed features, the vivid, almost luminous, alabaster- 
like pallor of the skin, with the pure tint, even in 
extreme age, of the rare flush when it came, the for- 
midable roll and far-reaching flash of the eye, like that 
which I have seen an old condor in captivity cast upon 
the crowd from his rock-perch in the public garden, 
made his mere platform presence impressive beyond 
all others, even before there came into play the com- 
manding sonorities of the voice and every natural 
resource as well as every practised skill of the master 
orator. The Miltonic quotation for calling up his as- 
pect and presence in public debate is hackneyed, but 
fits so perfectly that I cannot forbear to repeat it : — 

— " with grave 
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed 
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven 
Deliberation sat, and public care " — 

— " Sage he stood, 
With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look 
Drew audience and attention still as night 
Or summer's noontide air." 

In saying that he possessed every skill and every re- 



WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 191 

source of the practised orator I should have made one 
reservation. Epigrammatic pith and point, the power 
of launching phrases that lit up the subject in a flash 
or confounded opponents with one thrust, were not 
among his gifts. Amplitude and plenitude, rhetorical 
abundance and iteration, were rather his weapons. 
As a writer most readers feel him to be distinctly, 
sometimes even distressingly, wordy. But of words 
when they were delivered with such intensity of con- 
viction, and in tones of such persuasion and command, 
as were his in public speaking, it seemed as though 
one could never have too much or even enough. 

Quite apart from the conspicuousness of a public 
occasion, or the contagion of the collective enthusi- 
asm of an audience, one was apt at any time, so long 
as he remained among us, to become suddenly aware 
in the street of the approach of a magnetic personality, 
one that made itself felt, it might be, some fifty yards 
away through the press, before one had time to realize 
that this was Mr. G. coming along, — " Mr. G." was 
the ordinary appellation in use among secretaries and 
other associates and intimates of his circle. An 
intimate frequenter of that circle I never was, though 
several of its members were my friends, and though 
I came in, at longish intervals through nearly thirty 
years, for an occasional share of the great man's own 
courtesy and kindness. The first time I met him was at 
Naworth, the Border seat of the Carlisle Howards, the 
same romantically placed, historically famous, and in 
those days delightfully hospitable house where I had 
first met Robert Browning a few years before. This 



192 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

was at the beginning of September, 1873, when Mr. 
Gladstone was in his fourth year of office as Prime 
Minister and the sixty-fourth of his age. He had been 
on an official visit to the Queen at Balmoral, and the 
route by which he had chosen to leave was a long 
day's walk, over some of the roughest tracks and 
through some of the wildest scenery in the Grampians, 
to Kingussie Station on the Highland Railway. Hav- 
ing slept one night at Kingussie, he took train the next 
day to Carlisle, and arrived at Na worth in the evening, 
to all appearance perfectly fresh and unfatigued by 
his long tramp of the day before. My occasional 
after-meetings with him used to be either again at 
the same house, or at one or another of several houses 
of his friends or connections in town and country, 
and occasionally in later days under his own roof in 
London. 

Politics were never a main interest of mine, except 
so far as they must be more or less the interest of every 
citizen ; and however much I might enjoy hearing 
Mr. Gladstone dilate out of the fullness of his experience 
on the political history of his own time (and in this he 
was ever at his best), to challenge him to a conversation 
on politics I should have thought an impertinence. 
His second dominant study and preoccupation, theo- 
logy, was for me also ruled out by my lack of compe- 
tence. But there were few other subjects of historical 
or literary interest on which he was not ready and 
equipped to talk ; and there were two in particular, 
Homer and Dante, which he had studied with as much 
zeal and persistency as any professed specialist in 



WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 193 

either field. Always strongly impressed while con- 
versation with him lasted, it generally happened to 
me, on thinking it over afterwards, to realize that 
what had impressed me had been less what he said 
than the way he said it, less the pertinence or originality 
of his matter than his fine manner and potent tempera- 
ment in discourse. In those first days at Naworth, 
I remember, I came in for a sample of what struck 
me as not being by any means his best. An oppor- 
tunity presenting itself, I strove hard to make him, 
with the photograph before us, share my enthusiasm 
for a certain splendid and almost uninjured Greek 
fourth-century head of a goddess, in all probability 
Aphrodite, discovered not long before in Armenia and 
then under offer to the British Museum by the dealer 
Castellani. Any and every Greek subject that might 
be broached led Mr. Gladstone's mind at once and 
inevitably to Homer. Naturally I did not disclose 
the fact that I was one of the reviewers who some time 
earlier, in dealing with his volume Juventus Mundi, 
had expressed without compromise the opinion (shared 
by practically all trained scholars and archaeologists) 
that no Homeric critic had ever shown, along with so 
minute and systematically tabulated a knowledge of 
the text, such ingenious perversity as he in comment 
and interpretation. For one thing Mr. Gladstone held, 
and worked out with insistent affirmation and detail, 
the theory that the Iliad and Odyssey were indis- 
putably the work of a single individual poet ; that so 
far as concerns the war of Troy in its human aspects 
the Iliad is strictly historical, and that as to the gods 



194 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and goddesses who play so large a part in the story, 
they and their several characters and the Olympian 
system to which they belong are the actual creation 
of Homer himself. I found that these rooted con- 
victions concerning Homer stood in the way of his 
being much interested in my Aphrodite head, or even 
admitting that it could be Aphrodite at all. Looking 
upon Homer as the one responsible founder and 
" maker " (his own word) of the Greek religion, and 
regulator of the functions and precedence of the 
Greek gods — as it were a kind of Lord Chamberlain 
of Olympus — he had decided, from the more or less 
humiliating predicaments in which the poet puts her 
both in the Iliad and Odyssey, that Homer had for 
moral reasons deliberately made Aphrodite ridiculous. 
Ridiculous, or at least trivial, she must accordingly 
remain ; therefore the divinity represented in this 
grand head could not be she. On this theme he dilated 
with unquestioning energy and conviction. It was 
no use quoting the " Venus of Milo " and other well- 
known existing types of a noble and dignified Aphrodite. 
Of ideas running counter to his preconceptions his 
mind was not receptive, and his quite unfounded 
negative assurance on this point could not be shaken. 
I was half inclined at the time to suppose that his cold- 
ness in response to my enthusiasm must arise from 
caution lest I should have designs upon the public 
purse in connection with the purchase of this head. 
If so, his caution was belated, for the purchase, though 
I did not know it at the time, had actually been con- 
cluded ten days before. 



WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 195 

But his mind, as I had occasion more than once to 
observe, seemed always in an alert attitude of self- 
defence against any suggestion that seemed to point to 
an increased expenditure from the public purse. Con- 
versation having one day turned on public salaries and 
the relative scales of pay for this or that kind of 
service, Mr. Gladstone said to me, " I for one would 
never be a party to increasing the salaries of you 
gentlemen of the British Museum, for a more delightful 
occupation I cannot conceive." I forbore to ask the 
great man whether he would push this view to its logical 
conclusion : whether, for instance, he would reduce the 
salary of a Prime Minister in proportion to the pleasure 
he might take in his work, or whether he would go the 
whole length with the late William Morris, who held, if 
I remember aright, that the most unpleasant kinds of 
labour ought to be the best paid, and that the coal- 
heaver, the dustman, and the scavenger ought to be con- 
soled for the nature of their job by being given only about 
two hours' work a day and allowed during the rest of 
their time to spark about in velvet and sables. I merely 
agreed with his opinion of the Museum life and work. 

Other talks which I specially well remember were 
marked, not by any such kind of critical perversity 
as those about Homer, but rather by the vehement 
affirmation of something commonplace and generally 
acknowledged. Young's Night Thoughts were men- 
tioned, and Mr. Gladstone quoted some lines of the 
poem (I cannot remember which), lines of a gloomy and 
grand enough pomposity in their imitative sub- 
Miltonic manner ; and went on to speak of the work 



196 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

in general with respectful admiration, in the tone which 
had been habitual to an earlier generation than mine, 
or even, I should have supposed, than his own. He 
further reminded his hearers of the extraordinarily- 
high place — equal to or higher than that of Paradise 
Lost itself — which the Night Thoughts had held for 
several generations in the esteem of continental readers, 
especially in France and Germany. " But," he then 
burst out, bringing his fist down with something of 
the flash and thunder of righteous indignation which 
so often signalized his public utterances, " but the 
man was a lickspittle and a sycophant ; he was a 
shameless, fawning preferment-hunter." And he went 
on to denounce the grovelling flattery of Young's 
miscellaneous dedications to every kind of nobleman 
and place-holder, no matter how disreputable, his greed 
and baseness in hanging on in early life as a suppliant 
for patronage to the infamous Duke of Wharton, and 
later in disgracing his cloth by subservience to the 
King's mistress, Lady Yarmouth. He wound up by 
dwelling on the betterment of the times, which would 
make such proceedings on the part of such a man 
now equally needless and impossible. 

The best talk about literature in which I can remem- 
ber Mr. Gladstone taking a leading part turned on the 
nature and elements of tragedy, and on the difference 
between themes inherently tragic and those which 
owed their tragic character mainly to their treatment. 
Some examples from Greek and Elizabethan drama 
having been discussed, Mr. Gladstone presently, in 
his most earnest and arresting manner, affirmed that 



WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 197 

in his judgment no theme was either more tragic in 
itself or more heightened in effect by its treatment 
than that of Scott's Bride of Lammermoor. He in- 
sisted on the circumstances of the deadly hereditary 
hate, fresher and better grounded than that of Mon- 
tagues and Capulets, between the houses of Ravens- 
wood and Ashton, and on the sense of such fixed 
implacable hate foredooming to disaster what might 
under other stars have been the reconciling loves of 
Edgar and Lucy. He dwelt on the heightening of all 
the actions and passions by the romantic gloom of 
the scenery amid which the tale unfolds itself, and by 
the grim staves of legendary prophecy represented as 
current in the minds of the common people and 
creating from the first an atmosphere of dire expectancy 
and awe. He reminded us how such prophetic saws and 
staves are not only ever on the lips of the hateful 
warlock, Elsie Gourlay, but how they darken with 
tragic foreknowledge even that almost incomparable, 
almost fully Shakespearean, comic and pathetic crea- 
tion of the old steward Caleb Balderstone ; and he 
dilated on the terrible intensity of the scene of the mad 
bride-murderess on her wedding night, and on the 
foretold but not less thrilling climax of the disappear- 
ance of the last heir of Ravenswood in the Kelpie's 
Flow. None of those present was disposed to contest 
on general grounds the claim thus made for Scott's 
masterpiece, I least of all ; * and the further talk, to 

* Let me take this opportunity of expressing my extreme dissent 
from the slighting estimate of the Bride of Lammermoor given 
by Dr. T. F. Henderson in the Cambridge History of Literature 
(toI. xii, p. 22). 



198 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

which Mr. Gladstone listened attentively but did not, 
if I remember aright, contribute much, turned on 
certain doubts and reservations to be made in regard 
to it ; as for instance, whether some of the incidents, 
such as those of the wild bull and the crash of lightning 
on Wolfe's Crag in the opening chapters, did not push 
romantic coincidence to the point of melodrama, and 
whether the Master himself is not a character par- 
taking as much of the externally and conventionally 
melodramatic as of the truly tragic. And how, we 
all agreed in wondering, could the magician in his 
carelessness possibly have allowed himself to introduce, 
as he does, the finely conceived incident of the appari- 
tion to the Master beside the Mermaid's well of the 
spirit of old Alice at the moment of her death with 
an apology to the rationalist and sceptical which robs 
it of half its effect ? 

Another particularly vivid memory of Mr. Gladstone 
remaining with me is of an utterance humorously 
verging on the political. (As a rule I ventured to think 
him not at his best in humorous moments, and even 
that his countenance at such moments lost something 
of its paramount distinction, his smile of fun having 
in it rather more of slyness than of sweetness.) In 
the early autumn of 1881 he and I were walking side 
by side along a garden path at Hoar Cross, the country 
house of the sister of one of his great lifelong political 
allies, Lord Halifax. He was suffering from an attack 
of lumbago, and walked with his back bent and his 
hand held to the place where the pain was. Having 
once or twice tried to straighten himself up and found 



WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 199 

the effort hurt him, he turned to me, still stooping with 
his hand to his back, and fastening his eyes on mine, 
said with a manner half jocular half distressful, but 
impressive as always, " I don't know whether to treat 
it by the method of conciliation or coercion." A few 
days later followed the great speech at Leeds de- 
nouncing the policy of Mr. Parnell and his associates 
as one of " marching through rapine to dismember- 
ment," and a little later again the administrative act 
of consigning the Irish leader to Kilmainham jail. 
" Conciliation versus coercion" — the phrase very soon 
became a regular, habitual and threadbare one in 
the course of the Home Rule controversies which 
followed. But as spoken at such a moment in the 
Hoar Cross garden it struck freshly and significantly 
upon my ear. 

It was at Cannes, in January, 1898, that I last had 
sight and speech of the great man. He was there as 
the guest of Lord and Lady Rendel, hoping to find 
from the climate some alleviation of the extremely 
painful illness (I believe internal cancer in the face 
near the eye) which had laid hold upon him. I hap- 
pened to be also there, as a visitor in another house. 
Being well acquainted with his hosts, I went to call on 
them as a matter of course, without dreaming that I 
should be able to see their suffering guest, upon whose 
attention, under such circumstances, I had no claim 
whatever either of intimacy or of special allegiance. 
But they said they were sure he would like to shake 
hands with me, and took it upon themselves to send 
him word that I was there. To my surprise he sent 



200 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

for me, just as he was getting into the carriage for his 
customary invalid drive, and with a manner of beautiful 
grace and courtesy, though evidently in severe pain, 
said that he was glad to have the opportunity of 
speaking with me, that he wished it were in his power to 
speak more and better, and bade me a grave, almost 
solemn good-bye, as though he felt that the end was 
drawing near. A kindlier, even a more touching, 
last memory of the illustrious veteran I could scarcely 
have had to carry away. He died in his own home 
some four months later. 



CHAPTER Xn 
THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 

From the thirty or all but thirty years which I 
spent living at and working for the British Museum 
there naturally lingers in my mind a varied medley 
of memories. But how attempt to sift and sort them ? 
How single out this or that group for inclusion in a 
budget, such as this is meant to be, of recollections of 
special places and individual persons ? To call the 
British Museum a place would seem a misnomer. 
Regarded as an area in the heart of London it is incon- 
siderable. Regarded as an architectural monument 
it is certainly less impressive than its designers intended 
it to be. Regarded for its contents and purposes it 
is neither more nor less than an epitome of the civiliza- 
tion of the world. No single imagination could frame 
or grasp an adequate conception of what is contained 
under that dome and in those galleries at Bloomsbury. 
The name Bloomsbury has in itself somehow a trivial 
sound and bourgeois associations. What name could 
be too august, too rich with connotations at once of 
learning and of romance, to be bestowed on that 
treasure-house where are assembled, besides the richest 
extant store of the written and printed products of 
man's mind, a share so vast and in quality so incom- 

201 



202 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

parable of the choicest examples of his handiwork ? 
Though one of the latest of all the great museums of 
the Old World in its date of foundation, it may be 
counted the richest of them all in contents. Library 
and galleries together, even since the natural history 
collections were transferred to another part of the 
town, the treasures sheltered behind that colonnade 
and under those roofs are unmatchable. To have for 
one's life-work a responsible share in their custody, 
their management and augmentation, should surely 
be a thing to fill one's days with pride and to exalt the 
gait of one's ingoings and outgoings. 

Well, well, I suppose no one, however privileged his 
or her vocation, has the sense of such privilege always 
consciously in mind. Daily duties are daily duties 
whatever their nature, and one's tendency is to go 
about them in an everyday, which is as much as to 
say in a humdrum, spirit. It might even be contended 
that those among us are the luckiest whose round of 
bread-winning duties is really humdrum and dull, so 
that the delights of art and literature, and of conver- 
sance with things of beauty and the mind, being reserved 
for the hours of leisure, may appeal all the more for- 
cibly to sensibilities undulled by habit. Speaking 
for myself, I cannot pretend that I was habitually 
conscious of any special pride or privilege in living in 
an official house behind the long railing in Great 
Russell Street, and being saluted by liveried guardians, 
and passing up the steps and under the portico of 
the great facade on my way to my daily duties. The 
duties themselves involved, no doubt, one special 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 203 

and unmistakable kind of pleasure, namely that arising 
from a consciousness of faculties necessarily, from the 
very nature of their employment, sharpening by daily 
exercise in the expert's work of technical knowledge 
and discrimination. At the same time a large pro- 
portion of the objects upon which such faculties had 
to be employed, at any rate in the special department 
of which I had charge, namely that of prints and 
drawings, were dull enough in themselves, the tedious 
uninspired output of scores and hundreds of mechanical 
plodders of all schools. A minority, on the other hand, 
were of a kind to awaken and keep awake whatever 
capacity of delighted appreciation, technical, aesthetic, 
and imaginative, one might possess. Use and familiar- 
ity could not much or permanently dull the zest of 
studying and handling and having charge of the most 
inspired and intimately personal handiwork of a 
Botticelli or a Raphael or a Michelangelo, a Diirer 
or a Rembrandt, a Turner or a Constable or a Blake, 
although on this or that day the sense of delighted 
admiration for and privileged intimacy with such 
spirits through their handiwork might and did strike 
home more deeply and happily than on others. 

Furthermore, the mere necessary going to and fro 
between one's dwelling-house and one's work was apt 
at any casual moment to rouse one to a sudden thrilling 
pitch of delight in human achievement and of activity 
in the imaginative reconstruction of past glories. 
During all the earlier years of my service the approach 
to my department was through the Elgin room. 
Passing several times every day these fragments of 



204 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

the finest and most felicitous of all achievements of 
human art, seeing them close at hand by every kind 
of light or half-light which an enclosed and roofed 
gallery and the varying dimness of the London atmo- 
sphere could afford, one took their glory for granted 
perhaps a hundred times against once or twice that 
one paused to realize and respond to it anew. And 
more rarely still one caught oneself in the endeavour 
to restore in imagination the temple with its pedi- 
mental groups, of which these were but the angle 
figures spared when the Venetian bomb-shells cast 
down and shattered the rest, and to give thanks that 
against that special episode in the unceasing world- 
tragedy of the Ruins of Time there is this one consola- 
tion at least to be set off, that here in the Bloomsbury 
gallery these fragments are placed near enough to 
the eye for their perfections to be gauged and studied, 
to be realized and taken in and absorbed, as could 
never have been the case when they stood when the 
building was intact, serving a merely decorative purpose 
in their pedimental angles forty feet above the eye. 
Of all random denunciations, Byron's tirade against 
Lord Elgin, in the Curse of Minerva, for removing 
these master works from their shattered pediments is 
perhaps the most perverse and foolish. 

But the occupation of a museum official is not con- 
cerned only with the treasures of human handiwork 
under his care or coming daily under his eye. He 
needs also to be a student of human character, and 
has plenty of scope for any faculty in that kind with 
which nature or experience may have endowed him. 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 205 

For one thing, it is a chief part of his duty to win the 
regard and confidence of private collectors, to help 
and stimulate them in their pursuits, putting his 
knowledge at their disposal but making them feel the 
while that their prime, their binding, duty is to acknow- 
ledge such help by destining their collections in the 
long run to enrich the institution which he serves. 
It is open to a collector to do one of three things 
with his treasures after his death : leave them intact 
to his heirs : leave them to be dispersed by auction, 
or leave them to enrich some public gallery or museum. 
The first alternative generally attracts him least. 
The second appeals to him by the thought of the excite- 
ment and competition, such as have been the zest of 
his own life, which his sale will arouse among other" 
amateurs and collectors, folk of his own kidney, after 
he is gone. The third offers the reward of the perman- 
ent recognition which will await his name as that of an 
enlightened amateur and national or civic benefactor. 
It is the value and excellence of this last reward which 
those public guardians of such things whom he may 
count among his friends are bound with all their power 
to impress upon him. 

Apart from such practical ends, a study interesting 
in itself might doubtless be made of the comparative 
psychology of collectors, of persons in whom the love 
of having and handling picked works of art and handi- 
craft for their own is a passion innate or acquired. 
In creative literature, I do not remember any special 
instance of a character in whom the collecting passion 
is incarnate except that famous one of Cousin Pons 



206 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

in Balzac's Les Parents Pauvres. In life, so far as I 
have been able to observe, the passion is apt to lay- 
hold on persons of the most diverse origin and tempera- 
ment having nothing else in common between them. 
Of those whose collections have in my time enriched 
our national museum, including my own department, 
some of the most notable have been Henry Vaughan, 
George Salting, John Malcolm of Poltalloch and 
William Mitchell. Vaughan was the son of a wholesale 
hatmaker in Southwark, and a man of the most quiet 
and retiring, devoutly beneficent and charitable dis- 
position. Early travel and inborn instinct implanted 
in him a love of art which made collecting one of his 
two absorbing pursuits through all his length of days, 
the other being charity and good works. To his gifts 
and bequests half the public galleries in the kingdom, 
and my own department at the British Museum in 
particular, owe much of their wealth in the works of 
Michelangelo, as well as of Turner, Flaxman, Constable 
and the other English masters of that age. George 
Salting was the Australian-born son of parents originally 
Danish , who after an education for very brief terms each 
at Eton and Oxford, but chiefly at Sydney University, 
which seemed to promise aptitude for literature and 
the classics, was diverted by a winter spent at Rome 
to a passion for the visible and tangible treasures of 
mediseval, Renaissance, and Oriental art and handi- 
craft. Living the simplest of bachelor lives in cham- 
bers at the Thatched House, St. James's, Salting 
spent practically all his days in the sale-rooms of London 
and the income of a great fortune, the capital of which 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 207 

he had himself vastly increased, on the purchase of 
treasures chiefly in the form of pottery, enamels, 
bronzes, medals and engraved gems ; and in the end 
he distributed them, as every good collector should, 
among the various museums of London. Malcolm of 
Poltalloch on his part was a great highland laird, 
whose passion as a collector — to a large extent stimu- 
lated as well as directed by an inseparable fidus Achates 
in the person of a bachelor friend of education (and 
I believe origin) partly German, William Mitchell — 
was for drawings and prints of all schools. The 
purchase of his treasures for the British Museum 
after his death almost doubled the importance of the 
department I had the honour to serve. 

Neither is it among collectors and benefactors alone 
that a museum official finds interesting human objects 
of study. He finds them, if he has any eye for such 
studies, among his colleagues no less. Since appoint- 
ments of officials have come to be entirely by the 
routine mode of competitive civil service examination, 
perhaps there is less scope than there used to be for a 
marked idiosyncrasy to guide a man in the choice 
of a museum career or to develop itself during its 
course. But among my contemporaries and seniors 
there were certainly plenty of such picturesque and 
salient characters. To name only one or two — who 
that ever met Richard Garnett (and during the ten 
years when he was superintendent of the Beading 
Boom every one who frequented it met him as a 
matter of course) can have forgotten him ? The most 
genially quaint of erudite men, the most helpful, the 



208 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

most smiling and queerly attractive to look at in 
spite of his stained teeth and bristling russet stubble 
of a beard, he was not, I suppose, a trained bibliographer 
in the full modern sense, but had a vast and varied 
practical knowledge of books and the most indefatig- 
ably obliging courtesy in helping all those who sought 
his help in their studies. Sedulous as he was in every 
museum duty, Garnett found time for a vast amount 
of reading and much miscellaneous critical and bio- 
graphical writing outside his official work, and has 
left with all his colleagues a memory at which we cannot 
forbear to smile, but which we affectionately esteem 
and honour none the less. A colleague of the same 
generation but of strongly contrasted type was Wool- 
laston Franks, a man of fortune and of a Cambridge 
education, who from the beginning, whilst he only 
learned the necessary minimum of the regular Cam- 
bridge studies, had ploughed out a path for himself in 
the pursuit first of one and then of another branch of 
archaeology, with a marked preference for the antiquities 
of mediaeval England, and before long was appointed 
head of the newly created department of British and 
Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography. One after 
another he took up new specialities like the study of 
pottery and porcelain, first English and Continental, 
then Chinese and Japanese, of Japanese sword-guards 
and finger-rings, of drinking vessels ; of ancient 
Bactrian and Indian gold ornaments ; of book-plates ; 
making himself a master expert in one of these studies 
after another, and in the end patriotically bequeathing 
all his collections to the institution of which he was so 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 209 

great a servant. Franks could if he had chosen have 
been a great man of the world as well as a great anti- 
quary and museum keeper ; but for general society he 
cared little and was content with the hearty affection 
and homage of all whom community of pursuits and 
interests brought within his sphere. 

Of such marked and interesting personalities among 
my senior colleagues at Bloomsbury, the one with 
whom I was on terms of closest intimacy and of whom 
I retain the warmest recollection was the keeper of 
Greek and Roman Antiquities, Charles Newton. This 
is not a name known far and wide, like most of those 
I am recalling in the present pages ; nor was its bearer 
in the full sense of the word a man of genius. That 
is to say he had not the intensity of being, the radiating 
fire of the spirit, which gives to the personality of 
genius its power to dominate or enthral. But he had 
a character, and a very marked character, of his own : 
his actual achievement was a considerable one in the 
history of English, nay, of general Western culture, 
and in the absence of any full or formal biography it 
is right that some picture of him, as living as may be 
however brief, should be attempted by one who like 
myself enjoyed the honour of his regard and the 
advantage of his teaching. He was my senior by 
all but thirty years, and I first knew him when I came 
to London fresh from my Cambridge degree in 1867-68 
and threw myself — among other studies which I did 
my best at the same time to master and to expound 
in popular reviews and journals — into the special study 
of classical archaeology. Newton had then already 



210 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

been for seven years Keeper of the Department of 
Classical Antiquities at the British Museum. He had 
served in a subordinate post in the same institution 
for twelve years after his Oxford degree (1840-52), 
and then for a spell of seven years had held consular 
office in the Levant, first at Mytilene and then at 
Rhodes, being charged at the same time with represent- 
ing the interests of the British Museum in Asiatic 
Turkey and the islands. The first great stimulus to 
excavation by Englishmen on the sites of ancient 
and buried civilizations had been given by the under- 
takings carried out by Layard between 1842 and 1851, 
originally on the personal impulse of Stratford Canning 
(afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the " great 
Eltchi ") and next on that of government for the 
British Museum, at Kouyunjik andNimrud and other 
centres of Assyrian and Babylonian empire. It was 
again with the strong backing of the same all-powerful 
ambassador that Newton had been enabled, during 
the years of the Crimean war and those next following, 
to carry out the most systematic and successful excava- 
tions which had ever been undertaken in those parts 
in search of Greek antiquities and inscriptions. He had 
been fitted above other men for the task by a natural 
instinct — a natural affinity, one might almost put it, 
with the objects of his pursuit — as well as by the most 
careful training and preparation. A fully equipped 
Oxford scholar from Shrewsbury and Christchurch, he 
possessed besides what it had been too much the habit 
and defect of English scholarship to lack, a strong and 
well instructed love for the extant remains of Greek 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 211 

art ; while the records of Greek public and private life 
and usage preserved in lapidary inscriptions at all 
times interested him and exercised his faculties even 
more than those handed down in books. 

Both these classes of material were capable of 
being augmented from hour to hour by investigation 
on the sites of ancient cities and burial-places, and 
it had been the passion of Newton's life so to aug- 
ment them. The result of his labours during those 
responsible years on the coasts and in the islands 
of the Levant had been to rescue for the study and 
admiration of the after world, and secure for the 
enrichment of his museum, all those remains of the 
renowned Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the master- 
work of the second great school of Athenian sculptors 
and architects in the fourth century B.C., which lay 
buried under the buildings of the Turkish town of 
Budrum : the two noble colossal portrait figures, 
shattered but restorable, of Mausolos himself and his 
wife Artemisia ; a headless rider on the fragment of a 
great rearing horse ; the unbroken head and forehand 
of another and huger horse standing with the bronze 
bit intact in its mouth ; many mutilated great guardian 
lions ; many exquisite frieze-fragments, some almost 
perfectly preserved, of righting Amazon and Centaur 
and racing charioteer ; beautifully wrought blocks of 
column, cornice, architrave and capital — Newton's 
work had been to rescue and secure these, besides such 
a unique and moving masterpiece of the antique genius 
as the seated statue of the sorrowing Demeter from 
Cnidos, and the series of solemn semi-Egyptian seated 



212 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

figures from the great temple-avenue at Branchidse, 
with many treasures more not here to be recounted. 

These excavations of Newton's in the fifties, carried 
out with public money and Government backing, were 
much the most systematic and most fruitful that had 
ever been attempted on Greek sites, and did more than 
anything else to set the example and give the impulse 
to the series of undertakings in the same kind, more 
numerous than can be counted, which have been 
carried out in later years by researchers of almost 
every civilized nationality. Some of these have been 
much more highly trained than he in the special and 
technical study of architecture : but in another 
speciality, that is in epigraphy or the science of 
inscriptions, Newton was a master abreast of the 
foremost. He had a rooted preference for this study, 
as resting on firm and positive data, over that of the 
archaeology of art, as developed, chiefly in Germany, 
on speculative and deductive lines which he held to 
be unsure and often fanciful. After his return from 
his labours in Asia Minor and appointment as Keeper 
at the British Museum, Newton by his authority and 
influence, though no longer by explorations of his 
own conducting, continued on a great scale the enrich- 
ment of his department. Other explorers under his 
impulse and suggestion discovered and sent home 
precious remains from Ephesus, Priene, Cyrene, from 
Sicily and Cyprus : and concurrently with these gains 
a parsimonious Treasury was induced to provide funds 
for the purchase, one after another, of nearly all the 
chief collections formed by continental amateurs and 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 213 

dealers ; the Blacas collection for one ; from the 
great Italian dealer Castellani several collections in 
succession, besides single acquisitions any one of which 
was apt to be an event and an excitement in itself; 
as for instance that magnificent, all but uninjured, 
bronze colossal head of a goddess found in the farther 
parts of Armenia, which has been conjectured to have 
been broken from some famous work, or replica of a 
work, by Praxiteles, and which stands scarcely rivalled 
in its kind in any museum of the world. 

I have said that Newton had the passion for these 
things ; but in spite of his achievement the word 
seems hardly suitable to a man of his temperament. 
Staunch and even tender in kindness towards those he 
cared for and had learned to trust, he was of a reserved 
and rather austere habit in ordinary intercourse, and 
by experience and training had acquired a degree of 
caution and mistrustfulness with strangers which might 
easily have been mistaken for cynicism. He had two 
smiles, one, and I fear the more frequent, cold and 
sceptical, but another, reserved for his tried friends and 
for young children, very deeply and touchingly tender. 
As he moved about with a somewhat shuffling or 
flinching gait (for his feet did not in later years carry 
him very well) among the noble damaged marbles at 
the British Museum, the kinship between him and 
them seemed to strike obviously upon the eye. True, 
his tall figure was too spare for that of a rightly pro- 
portioned Greek god or demigod or sage, but his head 
was truly Olympian. The hair grew outward from 
the parting in rich and waving grizzled masses, to 



214 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

which corresponded a square grizzled beard somewhat 
roughly kempt : the brow was intent and deeply 
corrugated, the features severely handsome save for a 
broken nose, the result of a fall ; but this seemed 
only to complete his facial likeness to a Greek Zeus 
injured and imperfectly restored. A great scholar and 
a great gentleman, he was in all companies a distin- 
guished presence and in all the best was made welcome. 
His style, in conversation as in writing and lecturing, 
was marked by a certain old-fashioned dryness and 
dignity scarcely less telling in its way than the richer 
colouring of more expansive or more imaginative 
talkers ; and in dealing with pretension whether social 
or intellectual he had a vein of irony the more effective 
for being kept scrupulously within the bounds of formal 
courtesy. On occasion he could not only cuttingly 
give but generously take a lesson. A much younger 
colleague in the Museum, then assistant-keeper in the 
department next to his, had cause once to stand up 
against him and experience the result. Some re- 
arrangements between the two neighbour departments 
were in progress, and for a few days the assistant in 
the department not Newton's was left in charge in the 
absence of his chief. Newton came along and told 
him, in the manner of one giving an order, to carry 
out some of the removals which had been under 
discussion. He declined : Newton repeated the instruc- 
tion more peremptorily : he again declined : the same 
thing happened a third time, and Newton retired 
with a face of thunder, threatening " Very well, I shall 
report your conduct to the Trustees." The assistant 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 215 

waited for some days expecting trouble. But no 
trouble came ; and the only result was that from that 
day to the end Newton's manner to him became one 
of friendly warmth and greatly increased regard. 
Thinking the matter over, he had evidently decided 
in his own mind that the junior had been quite right 
in declining to take instructions affecting the depart- 
ment for which he was for the time being responsible 
from anyone excepting his own chief. 

When I first knew him he was only lately beginning 
to come into the world again after an overwhelming 
sorrow which left its mark on all his after-life. At 
the close of his labours in the Levant he had been 
for a short while British consul at Rome, and had 
there met Ann Mary Severn, the daughter of Joseph 
Severn, the devoted painter-friend of Keats. This 
lady was herself an artist of truly sensitive hand and 
eye, and by all accounts a person of the utmost charm 
and sweetness. She and Newton were married in 1860 
and lived a life of perfect harmony, she entering help- 
fully into all his interests and studies, and devoting 
her talent to the illustration of his books and lectures, 
until six years later she was suddenly carried away by 
an illness of a peculiarly painful and tragic character. 
As she lay unwell one day in her room she saw a 
workman killed by a fall from a scaffolding reared 
against an opposite house. The sight was more than 
in her weakened state she could bear, and she fell 
from that hour into a wild delirium, in which she 
could not endure the presence of him she loved best, 
and from which she was only released by death. He 



216 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

could never bring himself to speak of her afterwards, 
but those who knew him best were conscious that his 
innermost thoughts were always of his lost happiness. 
Come into the world again, however, he did, and I 
used to meet him at many places besides the scene 
of his official duties in the museum ; among others 
at the periodical dinners of the Dilettanti, an ancient 
and distinguished convivial society dating from the year 
1732, which had in its day combined the habit of high 
carouse with much good work in antiquarian discovery 
and publication, and still kept and keeps up its reputa- 
tion in the latter kind and some of its quaint convivial 
rites and usages, though not its excesses, in the former. 
Newton's discoveries in the fifties and his position at 
the museum afterwards had placed him first by common 
consent among the working classical archaeologists of 
his time in Europe. But that branch of study had 
since the days of Winckelmann been much more 
generally followed and understood among German 
scholars than among English ; and after their triumph 
and the establishment of their empire in 1870 the 
Germans, keen, to their credit be it said, in the pursuit 
and organization of every other science no less than 
of the sciences of conquest and spoliation — were 
determined to take a practical lead in archaeological 
research on classic ground. Their first great under- 
taking was the excavation, by arrangement with the 
Greek Government, of the site of the ancient temple and 
sacred enclosure of Zeus at Olympia, a scheme which 
had been for a while ardently entertained, but never 
put in hand, by Lord Elgin, and at which a few tenta- 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 217 

tive scratchings had later been actually made by 
the French under General Maison. By the winter 
of 1874-75 this undertaking was in full swing. I was 
eager to visit and watch it, and with some difficulty 
persuaded Newton to meet me towards the end of 
March at Athens in order that we might arrange to 
travel thence to Olympia together. Some years had 
gone by since he had last been in the Levant. It was 
my own first visit to Greek soil. I have tried to 
convey in another place something of the thrill — 
for such it must be to every scholar not having a soul 
of putty — of my first sight of Athens and first days 
spent there, and shall here only recall a few traits of 
my elder companion during our trip. Travel in Greece 
was then very different from what it is now. The 
isthmus of Corinth had not then been cut by a canal, 
but had to be crossed by coach. There were no railways 
in the Peloponnese, and all travel was either by coasting 
steamer, or by carriage where there existed anything 
like a road, or else on horseback. The town nearest 
to the site of Olympia, from which the excavations 
were approached and supplied, was Pyrgos. Thither 
we had arranged to go by a coasting steamer from 
Corinth. We were pacing the shingle of the isthmus 
in readiness for the boat's early start when to my 
discomfiture a cold fit fell suddenly upon the spirits 
of my companion. He began conjuring up a vision 
of imaginary troubles and treacheries awaiting us on 
our projected trip, and actually proposed that we 
should give it up and go back to Athens. I knew 
him to have shown in the course of his career abundant 



218 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

coolness and resource in the presence of real danger, 
and guessed that there had come upon him in the 
morning chill a mood which is best explained by a 
passage in his book of Travels and Discoveries, telling 
how he once surprised a Greek servant in the act of 
robbing him : — 

I have not seen so livid and hideous a complexion since the 
day when Timoleon Pericles Vlasto was detected stealing coins 
from the British Museum. This man came to me from Smyrna 
with an excellent character. He had most engaging manners, 
and was always thanking me for my goodness to him, and telling 
me that I was better than a father to him. I have little doubt 
that he would have cut my throat with the same pleasant smile 
on his face. People in England wonder how it is that, after a 
long residence in the East, Europeans become so suspicious, jealous, 
and generally cantankerous ; but they forget that an Englishman 
in the Levant is doomed to pass his life surrounded by people who 
may be described by the ever-recurring phrase applied by Darius 
to his enemies in the Behistun inscription, " And he was a liar." 
The very air we breathe in Turkey is impregnated with lies. 

It turned out not difficult, however, to talk him 
out of this momentary mood. We pursued our journey, 
were landed at Katacolo, the port of Pyrgos, rode to 
the village of Druva, where the German scientific 
expedition was installed, were hospitably received, 
and spent some days studying with intense interest 
the results of the excavations so far as they had then 
been carried. From the mere configuration of the 
ground, with the brook Kladeos, its course marked 
at that season by flowering Judas-trees, running at an 
acute angle into the broad shingle-bed of the Alpheios 
near the foot of the hill Kronion, it was easy enough 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 219 

to recognize the general plan of the site, the great 
common centre of ancient Greek Zeus-worship and of 
athletic and poetic contests and glories. It was not 
too difficult to reconstruct in the mind's eye the aspect 
of the walled and consecrated precinct of the Altis, 
dominant within whose boundaries had stood the great 
temple of the god, besides his open-air altar and the 
hundred other temples and altars of Olympia, together 
with the innumerable multitude of votive and memorial 
statues, a forest of bronze and marble, which had 
crowded the intervening spaces. Nay, looking out 
from the side of the hill Kronion over the windings of 
the Alpheios, marked here by clouds of drifting dust 
and here by the shimmer of water, away to the 
gleaming level of the sea itself, it was hard not to break 
in your mind's eye the solitude of that sea-line, and 
to descry in imagination sails converging from the west, 
and throngs marshalling themselves beside the river- 
mouth, as when the sons of Hellas were wont to assemble 
in their galleys for the great anniversary from every 
state of the mainland and every colony overseas. . . . 
But the immediate daily fruits of the excavation 
were such as to leave little time for dreaming, and to 
raise in trained minds a hundred absorbing problems. 
Fragments of sculpture and architecture were coming 
up as thick as potatoes under the spade: the flying 
Victory of Paionios, duly identified by its inscribed 
pedestal ; many drums of the columns of the great 
temple lying regularly in rows as they had fallen 
outward ; the sculptured figures, one after another 
and all more or less shattered, of the east pediment 



220 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

of the same temple. Some of these finds seemed to 
confirm, some very perplexingly to contradict, anticipa- 
tions formed on the strength of ancient guide-books 
and histories. The fragments of the east pediment 
in particular, as then freshly unearthed, afforded one 
obvious such puzzle. The standard of excellence in 
pediment groups of the great period had been set in 
our minds by the figures remaining from the pediments 
of the Parthenon at Athens, those prime and crowning 
treasures of the British Museum, with their combination 
of grandly monumental decorative design and an 
almost gem-like finish. But here were these Olympian 
pediments, works of the same period and school, in 
comparison but roughly blocked out and showing 
the decorative purpose and quality almost unaccom- 
panied by any fineness of detail. Naturally Newton 
had in his guarded way much to say and to suggest 
on these antiquarian problems as each presented 
itself to us, and naturally his words were received 
with respectful attention. But it is not these which 
after the lapse of four-and-forty years remain in my 
mind. What remains perversely and indelibly fixed 
there is a trifling little scene which occurred on our 
way back to Athens. Instead of taking boat again 
from Katacolo we drove from Pyrgos across the plain 
of Elis, by such a rough, less than half-made apology 
for a road as then existed, as far as Patras, the chief 
port of Northern Peloponnese. About half-way we 
stopped for a meal at a little hostelry in the village of 
Ali Tchelebi, near the lakelet of the same name, then 
beautifully fringed with flowering oleander scrub. 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 221 

As we sat out after the meal we noticed a great hairy 
caterpillar near five inches long crawling perseveringly 
across the yard on some errand of its own. We 
were watching its progress with a mild interest when 
suddenly from a shed at one side a lean, long-legged 
hen came scurrying after it with outstretched neck, 
and in another moment had with a greedy chuckle 
gobbled it up. The event tickled the cynical fibres in 
my old friend's nature, and in a rare vein of smiling, 
disillusioned worldly wisdom he fell to moralizing 
upon it as a symbol of the predatory scheme of life 
in general and human life in particular. As such he 
would often humorously return to it in talk during 
after years in London, and it is perhaps this frequency 
of its laughing recall between us that has helped to 
keep it printed so ineffaceably on my mind's eye. 

But I will end what I have to say about this old 
friend with a memory of a different stamp. One of the 
things which had most united us from the first was the 
desire, which I had begun to cherish even as an under- 
graduate and which had been almost the guiding motive 
of Newton's life, to see the study of classical art and 
archaeology, hitherto neglected in our universities, 
take a regular and recognized place there beside the 
study of the classical languages and literature. In 
the years (1876-1884) when I had charge of the Fitz- 
william Museum at Cambridge, my main endeavour 
had been not so much to enrich its collection of miscel- 
laneous original objects of art as to save out of its 
revenue a fund for providing the first and indispensable 
apparatus for archaeological study in the shape of a 



222 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

gallery of casts from antique sculpture. The new 
gallery was built and stocked, and in April 1884 a 
representative company came to the ceremony of its 
formal opening. The Prince of Wales was present, and 
among the speakers were such practised celebrities as 
James Russell Lowell, then American minister in 
London ; Lord Houghton ; Professor Jebb, who had 
lately been public orator of the university ; and the 
president of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton. 
I can see and hear them now. Lowell, with his square 
and vigorous presence and his great square-cut tawny 
beard already beginning to grizzle, spoke without 
technical knowledge but with practised readiness and 
genial good sense as he regretted the absence of a 
brother diplomat who chanced to be a past master of 
these subjects (that was the then French ambassador 
in London, M. Waddington). Lord Houghton, on 
public occasions always eloquent and elegant in spite 
of a slipshod habit of dress and person, spoke, with 
sweeping gestures of the arm and his scarlet gown half 
slipping off his back, more aptly and graciously even 
than usual. Jebb, classically pointed and polished 
both in phrase and delivery, and Leighton, floridly 
handsome and winning in person and in the use of 
tongue and brush alike ever gracefully accomplished, 
were both at their best. But far the most effective 
speech of the day, despite its somewhat antiquated 
style and stiff delivery, was Newton's. For many 
years of his life he had laboured in vain to get his 
beloved studies officially recognized and admitted into 
the curriculum of his own university of Oxford. To 



BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 223 

see the object achieved at Cambridge, with the certainty 
that Oxford must soon follow, was to him like a view 
from Pisgah. His fine, worn and furrowed, now ageing 
face took a touching look of relief and happiness as 
he defined and defended with a master's insight the 
studies to which he had given his life, declaring as he 
wound up, " I rejoice to have seen this day ; it is a 
day I have waited for, and prayed for, and toiled for — 
in many lands — and when I looked this morning at 
the cast of the little figure of Proserpine I myself 
discovered at Cnidos, I was reminded of her avoSo? 
when she came back from the darkness of Hades into 
the light of the upper world, and the thought came 
to me that this was the apoSo? of archaeology, so long 
buried in England." 

There followed for Newton a time of gradually 
declining strength, during which his services having 
tardily received the reward of a public honour, he 
continued for a while with usefulness and dignity 
his work both as Keeper at the museum and lecturer 
at the University of London. The last years before 
his death were spent in retirement and much needed 
rest ; not without solace from the grateful affection 
of us who had known under his guarded exterior a 
spirit the most zealous in research and teaching and 
a heart the best to be trusted in friendship. 



CHAPTER XIII 

ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 

(1875) 

There is no place where a student is more likely to 
become absorbed in his special study than at Athens. 
But in letting himself be so absorbed, though he makes 
sure of gathering one kind of fruit from his journey, 
he is in danger of missing another kind. The mind too 
anxiously bent upon improvement is apt to have no 
attention left for chance impressions, and it is in the 
distinctness and variety of chance impressions that 
one half the good of travelling lies. At home, among 
familiar scenes, to see much in little things is the 
privilege either of egoism, whose slightest experiences 
are of importance to itself, or of genius. The rest of 
us are less impressionable, and let the thousand small 
circumstances of to-day go by us all but unawares. 
But abroad, we all notice and remember little things ; 
there is a strangeness in common sights, sounds, and 
scents, a vividness in our passing observations ; and 
we carry away, if we are not too dull or too pre- 
occupied, a treasure that we did not count on. 

I have only been a fortnight in Athens, and in the 
way of work, a fortnight could not well yield results 
worth mentioning. Accordingly of special studies 
I am not about to speak, only of some general aspects 

224 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 225 

of the place, and things that strike one there in by- 
hours. To any one loving Greek literature and art 
and tradition, the approach, the first sight of Athens, 
is naturally one of the great moments of life. And 
few things are better fitted to prepare and work one 
up for such a moment than the voyage, if you choose 
that route, from the Ionian islands by way of the 
isthmus of Corinth. Starting from Zante in the 
morning, you pass south of and presently leave astern 
the island-mass of Cephalonia, majestic in the noon-day 
haze ; you steam beneath the Acarnanian headlands, 
and stop for a while under the mountain that towers, 
crimson with sunset, above Patras ; at twilight you 
enter between the guarded points of Rhion and Antir- 
rhion, and pass along by night where the snows of 
Cyllene on the left, and Parnassus on the right, look 
down on the Corinthian gulf. These landlocked waters 
are treacherous and subject to hurricanes. What 
happened to Apollo and his crew on their voyage to 
Crissa may happen to any one, and did to us. In 
the middle of the night, after leaving Patras, 

So frank a gale there flew out of the west,* 

that our skipper was fain to bring his ship to under 
the lea of a cliff, and there she lay straining and tossing 
at her moorings for two hours, while the awakened 
passengers bemoaned themselves. When we came 
on deck at dawn, as the boat neared the port of Corinth, 
the sky was low and grey, and the cold gale was still 
* This is Chapman's spirited line for the Homeric, — 

rj\.d' avc/xos Ze<f>vpos //.eyas *-K Atos aunjs 
\aj3pu<; c^-aiyi^cov e£ attfepos. 



226 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

driving the ripple strongly upon the beach ; most of 
us were still staggering from sea-sickness, the most 
prosaically abject of human calamities ; the sense of 
excitement, of enjoyment, of expectancy, was for the 
moment utterly extinguished. But during the drive 
across the isthmus to Kalamaki, the port where one 
took steam again for Athens, the day grew bright, 
the mountain distances revealed themselves, the air 
blew fresh and ringing instead of chill ; the deadened 
faculties began to waken. By the time we were re- 
embarked, a Homeric hunger had succeeded to the 
morning's faintness ; and this satisfied, one was ready 
to take in again the glory of the world. It is a three- 
hours' run down the Saronic gulf from Kalamaki 
to the Piraeus, and all the while your heart is astir 
within you. The sea which leaps from the prow, and 
flashes under the following gale, is not sea but a sapphire 
wine of fabulous colour and intensity. The mountains, 
with their fainter azure, are mountains of enchant- 
ment ; far off behind some of those foldings on the 
right, you know, lie ruins of old fame, Tiryns and 
Mycenae and Cleonae ; on the left, the arid precipices 
of the Megarid descend in sunshine to the blue; in 
front, the gulf is almost closed by a crowd of steep 
and lovely coast and island forms which you have not 
yet learnt to name or distinguish. You want to shout 
schoolboy quotations to yourself ; you want to be 
alone with your emotions, and cannot bear anything 
which jars against or checks them. Your fellow- 
passengers become odious to you. A Greek youth, 
unctuous, familiar, inquisitive, accosts you for the 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 227 

twentieth time with an eye to business ; a Glasgow 
tourist prates about the beauties of the Clyde ; some- 
body offers you a cigar ; you turn savagely from them 
all, and make your way forward, where the deck is 
strewn with third-class passengers wrapped in their 
sheepskins, and picking your steps, clamber up beside 
the bowsprit, where you can be alone. The island of 
iEgina has by this time separated itself from the other 
mountain groups, and lies in front and to the right ; 
on the left, you cannot at all make out the projections 
and complications of the coast, but you know that 
the conical peak the boat is just rounding belongs to 
the island of Salamis, and are in high suspense for 
what will come next. You watch and watch, with 
snatches of Greek and snatches of English poetry 
ringing in your brain — 

Xnrapal koI lo<rT€<j)avoi /cat aoiBifioi — 
The fruitful immortal anointed adored 
Dear city of men without master or lord — 

and presently you swallow something in your throat, 
and give a shake from head to foot, as the immortal 
city wears in sight : that is to say, there appears a 
few miles before you a place in the coast where the 
higher mountains break back into a sort of amphi- 
theatre, and you discern a little cluster of rocks stand- 
ing clear in front of them. First you make out but 
one sharp crag — that must be Lycabettus ; next a 
lower one disengages itself, table-topped and with 
buildings on it, and that must be — it is — the Acropolis ; 
those buildings are the Parthenon, from thence flashed 
of yore the spear and helmet of Athene. There is 



228 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

another half hour, of which you do not take any pre- 
cise account, before the steamer comes to in the 
harbour of the Piraeus and is surrounded by a shoal 
of pinnaces bringing on board the health-officers and 
hotel and custom-house agents. These Piraeus boats 
are painted white, with gunwales striped red and 
yellow ; the harbour is surrounded with white or 
brightly- tinted buildings ; the water quivers with clear 
colour and reflection ; a crystalline and dancing bright- 
ness is in the air ; as you are rowed to shore, and start 
to drive from the harbour to the town, you are pene- 
trated with the sense of unaccustomed and radiant 
day. 

This lightness and clearness of the Athenian atmo- 
sphere, as it is the thing which strikes you first 
on landing, so is it that of which you remain most 
continually sensible. Not the 'KainrpoTaTv? aWr^p of 
Euripides, not all that poets have sung or travellers 
told, have fully prepared you for the reality. When 
day has followed day in which the world has lain 
flooded with radiance, and on night after night the 
stars have seemed to hang within reach almost, in 
unknown, nearer, brighter multitudes, till the spirit 
has thoroughly dilated itself in the new medium, still 
you find that habit has not made you insensible to 
this magic quality of the air. It is forced upon your 
attention by fresh sights and impressions that occur 
continually. The old market at the lower end of the 
town is a great place for one kind of such impressions 
which has nothing to do with ancient Athens or with 
your studies, but strikes vividly in upon your passive 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 229 

observation. Market-stalls and market people in 
counterchange of intense shadow and light, heaps of 
glowing oranges, piles of silk stuffs, figures in the scarlet 
fez and white or blue jacket and white fustanella, 
make pictures of intense Oriental colour, which you 
are apt to come upon suddenly, framed in the openings 
of the houses, as you descend from the Acropolis by 
one of the many narrow lanes of that quarter. Some- 
times, on the other hand, one of these sudden effects 
of daylight contains a whole revelation on the nature 
of ancient art. When, in one of the new buildings 
upon which the masons are at work all over the town 
— the University, the Academy, the Parliament- 
house, the Sculpture museum — you chance to see a 
piece of fresh-carved marble against the sky, it dazzles 
you with its excessive glitter and whiteness ; you 
understand at once why statues of pure untinted 
marble would not do in this climate, and why the 
ancient Greek, to make his groups of outdoor statues 
tolerable to the eye, must needs have toned and 
tinted them ; and how, further, it is probable that his 
marble surfaces in general were faced with some 
preparation which did for them then that which time, 
subduing the white glitter to a hundred rich diversities 
between ivory and amber, has done for them now. 
There is another way in which the Athenian daylight 
helps you to understand ancient art for the first time. 
The moment you see shadows like these, strong, sharp, 
and defined as by a needle's point, but nevertheless 
full, in the shaded surface, of a blue and bloomy light, 
you have gained a new revelation as to the powers 



230 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and effects both of sculpture and architecture. In 
the West we know nothing of this daylight, which 
at the same time cuts out every shadow into the sharp- 
est definition and force of contrast, and floods all that 
lies within the shadow with a soft and exquisite clear- 
ness. Every projection is thrown into intense relief, 
every play of surface is expressed with the subtlest 
gradation ; the commonest mason's work looks striking 
and beautiful. 

And if the atmosphere of Athens gives such special 
effect and brilliancy to various features of the modern 
town — to the shapes and shadows of cornice, capital, 
and balcony, or the attire of market-people grouped 
about their many-coloured wares, still more does the 
same atmosphere shed enchantment upon the landscape. 
The aspect of all mountains obeys and changes with 
the sky, but none that I have seen seem to owe so 
much of their glory to sky and air as those of Attica. 
Every one knows in some degree what is the configura- 
tion of that noble theatre in the midst of which the 
city stands. The rocks of Athens rise from a plain 
which is encompassed on all but the seaward side by 
the three ramparts of Hymettus, descending to the 
shore on the south-east, Pentelicus closing in the 
landward view north-east, and Parnes north-west ; 
with the lower, nearer range of Aigealos or Daphni- 
Vouni, cleft in two by the pass of Daphni, running 
from Parnes to the sea beyond Piraeus on the west, and 
cutting off the view of Eleusis and one half of Salamis. 
At first you do not think of these hills as either distant 
or lofty. The clearness with which you can distinguish 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 231 

every detail of their appearance makes them seem near, 
and the sense of ample horizon and unhemmed openness 
in which you breathe makes you feel as if, being near, 
they could not be high. Except on rare days of cloud, 
or when the scirocco drives a dusty haze across the 
world, you can discern every fold and facet of their 
slopes, you can make out every cleft and watercourse, 
almost every minute accident of colour and variety 
of surface on the rock. Nevertheless, it is nearly 
two hours' walk to the nearest of these ranges — to the 
first hollows about the base of Hymettus, or to the 
rise of Daphni in the opposite direction. The sum- 
mits of Parnes are twenty miles away and nearly five 
thousand feet high. In other climates, it is only in 
particular states of the weather that the remote seems 
so close, and then usually with an effect which is 
sharp and hard as well as clear. Here the clearness 
is soft ; nothing cuts or glitters, seen through that 
magic distance ; the air has not only a new trans- 
parency, so that you can see farther into it than 
elsewhere, but a new quality, like some crystal of an 
unknown water, so that to see into is greater glory. 
Such a sky does wonders for the land beneath it. 
The heights are barren and naked, as they always were, 
and for ages now the barrenness and nakedness has 
extended to the hollows and to a great part of the 
plain, where the populous demes once clustered. Here 
is nothing opulent ; here are none of the ornaments 
of our northern mountains, no green of the meadows or 
purple of the moors, nothing of what makes splendid 
the headlands of Wales or Scotland. These ranges 



232 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and promontories of sterile limestone have another 
distinction. Ridge beyond ridge they rear themselves, 
extend, sink, part, or close, in forms the most admirably 
harmonious. To watch their mere outlines is a delight 
and lesson for the eye ; still more to study the model- 
lings of their masses as they lie revealed in a thousand 
fine gradations of light and pearly shadow. To draw 
them is as difficult as to draw the Elgin marbles ; 
and in truth the Athenian sculptor did but carve his 
goddesses as his mountains had been carven for him 
from of old time. The colours of them are as austere 
and delicate as the forms. If here the scar of some 
old quarry throws a stain, or there the clinging of 
some thin leafage spreads a bloom, the stain is of 
gold and the bloom of silver. And whenever, in the 
general sterility, you find a little moderate verdure — 
a little moist grass, a cluster of cypresses — or whenever 
your eye lights upon the one wood of the district, the 
long olive-grove of the Cephissus, you are struck with 
a sudden sense of richness, and feel for the moment 
as though the splendours of the tropics could be 
nothing to this. So with the flowers ; a few thin 
tufts of asphodel, the small purple grape-hyacinths, 
the close-growing mountain-thyme, a knoll sprinkled 
with red or white anemones, seem to you wonders, 
and most of all the anemones, which flash upon you 
as the reddest and the whitest in the world. The affinity 
of Greek nature with Greek art, its power of producing, 
in the same way, effects of surpassing richness with 
means of extreme simplicity and severity, is the thing 
which the Athenian landscape brings continually home 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 233 

to you, in details as well as in the general aspect. 
In talking of the landscape, one is still talking of 
Athens ; for the town is not so large that it ever shuts 
you out from the sense of the country. It is curious 
to notice the different impressions one gets in different 
cities of the relation of city and country. In London 
that relation can hardly be said to exist ; the town is 
to our consciousness a world without limits, and we 
can hardly realize that even from a balloon, or in the 
survey of a travelling bird, it would be possible to see 
all round it, and take it in as the inhabited centre of 
an open champaign. From within, it is but now and 
then, when some clear wind is blowing, in some chance 
street, or from some high attic window opening north 
or south, that the heights of Hampstead or Norwood 
catch one's eye, and remind one, not without surprise, 
of the existence of a circumjacent world. Of great 
cities, Vienna, with its double river, and the mountains 
to be seen from its many open places, perhaps keeps 
the sense of the circumjacent most agreeably present to 
one's mind. Florence, however much smaller, is quite 
capable, with her narrow streets and beetling palaces, 
of making one forget for awhile her encompassing 
Apennines. The new town of Athens is growing fast, 
and already covers a great deal of ground, but by no 
means so as to coop one from the outer world ; one 
has not yet to resent a loss of view in consequence of 
its growth. But one has this to resent, that the view 
changes, in a certain fashion, as the town grows. The 
people want stone for building, and they get it where 
it can be got most conveniently — by blasting in the 



234 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

nearest heights. The nearest height of all is Lycabettus, 
a conical peak which dominates the town immediately 
behind the king's palace ; and the shape of Lycabettus, 
as the Athenian mariner of old beheld it from the 
gulf, has been really altered by modern quarrying. 
It has been, I believe, decided not to quarry any more 
on the conspicuous, the townward side of this particular 
peak ; but further back, and on adjacent eminences, 
the work goes on continuously. Boom, boom, one 
hears all day, as mine after mine is sprung ; and the 
fragments rattle down, and a scar is made, and those 
forms are changed that should stand fast for ever. 
Lycabettus, and other sacred rocks, are hewn, and 
suffer transformation, and rise again as the brand-new 
public building, the Panepistemion and the Boule — the 
University and the House of Parliament — of an Athens 
rejuvenate and complacent. The German scholastic 
architects, who planned the new town after the War 
of Liberation, have set an example of style which has 
been followed in the main, though none of the subse- 
quent buildings are either so vast or so pretentious 
as the square barrack of a royal palace. What the 
public buildings and great private houses most remind 
one of is Munich — a Munich with an added touch of 
the Oriental in the flat roofs and closed jalousies, 
and with the advantage of better materials. For the 
ornamental parts, Pentelicus is at hand with its marble 
of incomparable quality, and the native masons seem 
to have an hereditary art in fitting and working it. 
The stuccoes used for facing most of the wall-surfaces 
are of pleasant tints, and so, particularly, are the tiles 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 235 

of the roofs ; so that when one looks down over the 
town from some eminence its colour suits the scene. 
And when one walks along the great new thoroughfare, 
planted in boulevard fashion with pepper-trees, the 
modern Athens seems a place not unstately nor un- 
refined — until, perhaps, a cloud of hard white dust 
comes drifting with the wind, and your eyes smart, 
and your temper changes ; and then you may quickly 
fall into that other mood, which often one cannot 
resist, and may hate this prosperity and despise this 
civilization, and wish that, in this place at least, there 
were no present to thrust itself between you and the 
past, and feel as if, about the foot of the Acropolis, 
solitude and hyenas would be better than this crowd, 
superlatively and offensively modern, for so it somehow 
strikes you, which struts or saunters before the plate- 
glass windows. 

Quick-witted and hospitable people ! it ill becomes 
one who has shared your kindness, and hopes to share 
it again, to feel like this. And reason and humanity, 
as well as gratitude, aver that you have a right to 
build your new city — a Munich, yes, a Paris of your 
own, between the Acropolis and the groves of Academe 
— and to be busy with your parliamentary politics, 
and more taken up with to-day and its passions than 
with the past and its memories. But that which 
reason bids us remember we all the same forget, and 
continually fall into indignation, into petulance, against 
this population and its ways. The sight of neo-Greek 
words over the shop-doors, the sound of a neo-Greek 
speech the sense of which our self-willed, insular way 



236 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

of pronunciation has not taught us to catch, the tavern 
sign of the Nine Muses, the shopkeepers who write up 
their names Solon and Epaminondas and Alcibiades, 
the small boy who cries the comic paper ' Aristophanes ' 
with a true twang of the railway platform — all these 
things seem to us, at such moments, part of a conceited 
and intolerable travesty of greatness. It cannot but 
be so ; no living present with its trivialities could 
well seem to us other than the ape and desecrator 
of that past which has left us almost nothing trivial, 
almost nothing not ideal. We cannot, try as we may, 
we cannot really, familiarly, call up to our mind's 
eye the ancient Greek as he lived, laboured, bartered, 
laughed, quarrelled, and died; the accidents of 
history have conspired with the national genius to 
purge away from his visible record all marks of 
commonness or vulgarity. We go to that street, laid 
bare by the spade in recent years, by which the pro- 
cession used to set out to Eleusis, and where there 
are on each side the funeral monuments of dead Athen- 
ians ; and we ask ourselves, what was the real character, 
what the gestures, fashions, comings and goings, of 
that domestic life which is commemorated in the 
carvings of these tombs with such complete apparent 
naturalness, yet with such serene and inviolate 
decorum ? A mother sits in her chair, and stoops to 
kiss her departing child and pat its elbow. A man 
in ripe years, half turning to go, grasps the hand of 
his seated wife ; another speaks to his dog, who leaps 
up to crave for notice, as he goes out as if for the 
usual day's labour. Again, a man and wife grasp 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 237 

hands, while friends behind the chair look on sorrow- 
fully. Hegeso the daughter of Proxenos, so named 
in the inscription on her tomb, sits placidly, while 
her maid brings her in a dressing-casket some piece 
of attire such as a lady might wear when she walked 
abroad. Thus much of his real life the Greek will show 
us, but denuded of all nutter and circumstance ; he 
will carve, with many grave and sweet variations, the 
household good-byes of every day, in order to carry 
our thoughts, not to every day, but to that one day 
when those who say good-bye know that there will be 
no return at evening. Images decorous, indeed, and 
serene, but none the less moving ; for in these simple 
scenes of farewell and departure there lurks a tender- 
ness so poignant that one's heart is tightened and 
the tears come into one's eyes as one looks at them. 
Thus to express, in the familiar, everything but its 
familiarity — with so simple a spectacle thus to move 
and solemnize us — to show us nothing but the usual, 
and at the same time lift and chasten us from usual 
thoughts — what words can estimate, what musings 
fathom, that art of arts ? 

And should one be blamed for being impatient, if, 
when one is absorbed in this mystery of the Hellenic 
genius, shouts or chatter interrupt one's musings, and 
boys come rioting and pelting each other among the 
tombs, or trivial-seeming sons and daughters of 
contemporary Hellas pass gossipingly ? There is at 
least one place where one can be nearly sure of escaping 
the opportunities of the present, and realizing, as the 
religious seek to realize, that absorption which life 



238 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and traffic elsewhere interrupt ; that is the peak of 
Lycabettus, just above the town. I used to sit every 
morning under a rock near the top of Lycabettus, and 
let the view engrave itself by repetition upon my 
senses. You look down over Athens, down over 
the Acropolis dominating Athens, and thence over a 
space of basking plain to the gulf, and beyond the gulf, 
to the long faint-blue barrier, many-peaked, of the 
Argive mountains. The hither shore-line of the gulf, 
about five miles away, stretches all across the view, 
with moderate indentures and promontories on the 
side nearest Salamis and the spires of Aigealos (and 
on this side are the white buildings of the Piraeus 
clustering at the sea's edge), and with a more even 
sweep in the direction of Hymettus on the left. To- 
wards the centre is one chief indenture, the Bay of 
Phalerum ; of this the curve just coincides, in the 
view, with the table line of the Acropolis, so as to 
detach the Parthenon against a background of sea. 
Solitary stands that pillared stateliness, glittering white 
against the profound Mgesm blue. Nearly straight 
over the Acropolis, the island of iEgina, softened 
and darkened with distance, lifts a lovely mountain 
outline, and dimly behind Mgina, another island, Poros, 
heaves a grand shoulder that we can but half distin- 
guish from the many-folded ranges of the Argive 
mainland. The gulf, where it widens towards the 
open Mediterranean, lies misty under the morning 
sun, and passes thence through a long gradation 
from east to west into a blueness which is blackness 
almost, so profound, so intense is the colour, where 



ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 239 

its last inlets lie branching beneath the sunlit preci- 
pices of Salamis. Salamis, an island of many barren 
peaks, is flooded with sunlight on all its southern and 
eastern slopes. Beyond it stretch again the masses 
of the Peloponnesian mountains, and farthest of all 
one crest of pure and gleaming snow, the crest of 
Arcadian Cyllene. 

All of the living and the present which reaches you 
here is the sound sent up from below. The sounds, 
the cries of Athens, are discordant enough when you 
are among them, and are not limited to the town. 
Donkeys are much used in Attic husbandry, and the 
Attic donkey is notorious for braying incessantly. 
But the cries of the market and the news-vendors, 
the braying of donkeys about the farms, the calling 
of cavalry bugles, and one high clear note most con- 
tinuous of all, the ring of the masons' hammers upon 
the marble they are fashioning — all these sounds, 
through that magic air, ascend to you fused and 
musically softened, and make no jarring or inhar- 
monious accompaniment to your most rapt reflections. 



CHAPTER XIV 

EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 

It was in Newton's company, in the month of Febru- 
ary, 1881, that I had my only meeting with this remark- 
able survivor of the great days and great men of the 
opening century. To us of a later generation, or 
rather of several successive generations, Trelawny had 
become a personage legendary while he yet lived. We 
all knew thus much about him, that being the younger 
son of an old Cornish stock, endowed by nature with 
an ungovernable spirit and extraordinary bodily 
strength and hardihood, he had in boyhood been first 
expelled from school and then, at about twenty, a 
runaway from the King's Navy : next for a year or 
two a comrade and leader of privateers, scarcely to be 
distinguished from pirates, in the Eastern seas (though 
this phase of his career may perhaps be partly mythical) ; 
and next, for a few more years, to quote his own words, 
" a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken man of the 
civilized West." That next had come the chance, so 
happy for his life and fame, which made him first the 
associate of Shelley and Byron in Tuscany, and of 
Shelley in especial the ardent admirer and friend — 
the man who last spoke to the poet in life and who 
snatched his heart out of the pyre which consumed 

240 



EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 241 

his remains — and then, when Shelley was gone, the 
companion of Byron on his expedition in aid of Greek 
liberty. Both before and after Byron's death, Tre- 
lawny was the trusted lieutenant of the famous Greek 
chieftain Odysseus, a partisan at war equally with 
the Turk and with the provisional native Government 
at Athens, and was made the victim of an attempted 
assassination while left in charge of that chieftain's 
treasure in his cavern fortress on Mount Olympus. 
After his recovery and a few years spent in the Ionian 
Islands, the next phase of his life was that of a man of 
leisure and letters at Florence, the most confidential 
friend of Shelley's widow ; bent for a while himself 
upon writing Shelley's life, and when he was foiled in 
that hope, turning to weave the story of his own wild 
early days into a thrilling, inextricable, ultra-romantic 
blend of fact and fiction in his book The Adventures of a 
Younger Son. He reappears next as once more a 
traveller performing feats of strength and endurance 
in the wilder regions of America both North and South 
— feats unrecorded or vaguely recorded except that 
one feat of swimming across the rapids below Niagara, 
which he has himself described in what in his own 
energetic, untutored way of writing is perhaps his 
masterpiece. For some seasons thereafter he played 
his part as a conspicuous member of London society, 
made much of by fashionable folk in spite — or perhaps 
because — of his scorn of social rules and conventions. 
Then for another period he lived in the London 
suburbs as something of a recluse and in South Wales 
as a country gentleman and hardworking practical 



242 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

farmer and gardener, but never for very long without 
some scandal attending his name, for of all laws the 
marriage laws were those he respected least. Then 
he became for a second time an author, recounting his 
relations with Shelley and Byron and his experiences 
in Greece with a remarkable gift both of human 
presentment and of narrative : and thereafter lived on 
and on, for the most part in retirement in the country, 
until of his own memorable age he had become almost 
the last survivor, and an object of curiosity and pil- 
grimage to successions of younger men and women 
seeking in their minds or writings to reconstruct 
it. 

Naturally I had always had the wish to see this 
veteran, and at the date I have mentioned the oppor- 
tunity came. Newton and I were the guests for a 
winter week-end of our friends Captain and Lady 
Alice Gaisford in their Sussex home, distant about a 
mile from the cottage in the village of Sompting where 
Trelawny had then long been living. Our host, a 
brother Dilettante of Newton's and mine, was a son 
of the once famous Greek scholar and dean of Christ 
Church, Thomas Gaisford, and was himself a fine type 
of handsome, chivalrous, cultivated English gentleman. 
He was on terms of friendly regard and intercourse — 
under some degree of protest, if I remember aright, 
from Lady Alice — with the old rebel his neighbour, and 
by previous arrangement walked over with us and 
introduced us. The house where Trelawny lived was 
a large cottage painted red and set back a little way on 
the left-hand side of the road, not far from the entrance 



EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 243 

to the village. The veteran received us in a small, 
old-fashioned room on the ground floor, where he sat 
in an arm-chair with a couple of black-and-tan terriers 
playing about his feet. I had been accustomed to 
hear much of his extraordinary vigour. He had 
always been of abstemious habits, and although past 
eighty-eight, and a water-drinker, and although he had 
still inside him one of the two bullets which had been 
lodged there by the assassin Fenton during the Greek 
war of liberation, he was nevertheless, it was said, so 
strong that he had only lately given up the habit of 
bathing in the sea in all seasons, and of warming him- 
self on the coldest mornings, not at the fire, which 
he refused to have lighted before noon, but by the 
exercise of chopping wood. I was therefore somewhat 
surprised to perceive in him at first sight all the appear- 
ances of decrepitude. He scarcely moved himself in 
his chair on our entrance, but sat in a shrunken atti- 
tude, with his hands on his knees, speaking little, and 
as if he could only fix his attention by an effort. He 
wore an embroidered red cap, of the unbecoming shape 
in use in Byron's day, with a stiff projecting peak. 
His head thus appeared to no advantage ; nevertheless 
in the ashen colour of the face, the rough grey hair and 
beard and firmly modelled mouth set slightly awry, 
in the hard, clear, handsome aquiline profile (for the 
nose, though not long, was of marked aquiline shape), 
and in the masterful, scowling grey eye, there were 
traces of something both more distinguished and 
more formidable than is seen in Sir John Millais's 
well-known likeness of him as an old seaman in his 



244 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

picture " The North- West Passage " — a likeness with 
which the sitter himself was much dissatisfied. 

The talk ran at first on commonplace matters and 
mutual acquaintances. In its course the downright 
old man denounced as " lies " the ordinary formulas 
of social politeness and solicitude. His voice was at 
first weak and muffled ; at the same time his scorn 
of conventions seemed to declare itself in a certain 
bluntness and blufifness of utterance, and in tricks of 
pronunciation such as saying " strenth " for " strength" 
and sounding " put " with the vowel short as in " shut." 
Was this ruggedness of speech and manner, I could 
not help asking myself, quite genuine and natural in a 
gentleman born, who, rough as had been his early 
experiences, had nevertheless lived familiarly among 
equals whenever he chose ; or had it been at first 
wilfully adopted and become by degrees a second 
nature ? By and by he began to rouse himself, and 
then his conversation became, at least at intervals, 
curiously impressive. His moral and social reckless- 
ness, his defiance of current opinions, his turbulent 
energy, his sure eye for character and his no less sure 
instinct for literature, all made themselves felt, along 
with the extraordinary interest of his experiences. 
From time to time he would rise, almost bound, up in 
his chair, with his eyes fastened on yours like a vice, 
and in tones of incredible power would roar what he 
had to say into your face. I never heard in human 
conversation a voice so energetic as that which burst 
from the old man in these explosions ; explosions 
which subsided quickly, and in the intervals of which 



EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 245 

his accents were quiet and muffled as before. When 
the personal preliminaries were over we talked of 
current politics. It was the hour when the long 
negotiations between the British generals and adminis- 
trators and the Boer leaders had failed, and the opera- 
tions of the Transvaal war (of 1881) were in full swing. 
Trelawny defiantly declared his hope that the English 
would be beaten. " If I were a younger man," he 
shouted in a strong crescendo, " I would go and fight 
for the Boers — fight for the Boers — fight for the Boers." 
There was seeming imminent at the same hour 
another war nearer home, though not touching us so 
deeply. Greece had been pressing for the fulfilment 
by Turkey of those clauses of the Treaty of Berlin 
which handed over to her the provinces of Thessaly 
and Epirus. Turkish diplomacy had resisted by all 
the devices of obstinacy and cunning known to it; 
and the great Powers, each afraid of throwing Turkey 
into the arms of the other, had failed to insist, and 
striven, so far vainly, to effect a settlement by com- 
promise. Greece was preparing for war — and if war 
broke out, which side of the two, one of us asked, did 
Trelawny think would win. Who could tell ? he 
asked ; the Greeks had never, for two thousand years, 
faced an enemy in the open field. All their successes 
in the war of liberation had been won in guerilla 
fighting : the Turkish squadrons used to march in 
column along the plains, when the Greek sharpshooters 
would line the hills and harass or destroy them without 
exposing themselves. I had lately been re-reading 
Trelawny 's Records of Shelley, Byron, etc., and this 



246 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

answer reminded me of one of its most striking pas- 
sages, and showed me how entirely the old man was 
thinking in the light of his own experiences during the 
war of liberation some fifty-five years earlier. Here is 
the passage in question : — 

On our way to Corinth, we passed through the defiles of Der- 
venakia ; our road was a mere mule-path for about two leagues > 
winding along in the bed of a brook, flanked by rugged precipices. 
In this gorge, and a more rugged path above it, a large Ottoman 
force, principally cavalry, had been stopped, in the previous autumn, 
by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered like droves of 
cattle by the wild and exasperated Greeks. It was a perfect 
picture of the war, and told its own story ; the sagacity of the 
nimble-footed Greeks, and the hopeless stupidity of the Turkish 
commanders, were palpable : detached from the heaps of dead, 
we saw the skeletons of some bold riders who had attempted to 
scale the acclivities, still astride the skeletons of their horses, and 
in the rear, as if in the attempt to back out of the fray, the bleached 
bones of the negroes' hands still holding the hair ropes attached 
to the skulls of their camels — death like sleep is a strange posture- 
master. There were grouped in a narrow space five thousand or 
more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and mules ; vultures had 
eaten their flesh, and the sun had bleached their bones. 

Continuing on the same subject, one of us asked, 
would not Mr. Trelawny like to go and fight for Greece 
now, as he had fought for her before ? No, if after 
leaving Greece he had ever gone back there again he 
would without doubt have been assassinated. Why ? 
For the sake of plunder ; because he, and he alone, 
knew the caves and hiding-places where the chief 
Odysseus had deposited his treasure. Here again the 
veteran was evidently thinking in terms of his bygone 



EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 247 

experience. It was by the fabulous accounts of the 
wealth accumulated by Odysseus in his cavern on 
Mount Olympus that the Scotsman Fenton and his 
accomplice Whitcombe had been lured to their act of 
treachery. But granting that those hoards still re- 
mained untouched, and that Trelawny was the only 
man knowing the secret of their hiding-place, in what 
way an assassin in later times could possibly have 
profited by his death was not apparent ; neither did 
we press the point. Speaking of the actual attempt 
made on his life in 1825, Trelawny described how his 
Hungarian servant, standing on guard at the mouth 
of the cave, confronted and shot the would-be assassin 
Fenton, who was attempting to escape from within 
it under the pretext that what had just happened 
there was a dreadful accident. One of us, referring 
to the shot with which Fenton wounded Trelawny, 
not to that with which the Hungarian servant killed 
Fenton, asked if it had not been in the back, which 
as a matter of fact it was ; whereupon Trelawny, 
misunderstanding the question and still thinking of 
the action of the Hungarian, rose with a shout and 
a flash and called out, " No, in the face, in the 
face." 

Passing to the circumstances of Shelley's death in 
1822, Trelawny, after showing us the scar where he had 
burned his hand in plucking the poet's heart out of 
the ashes, detailed at length his reasons for believing 
that the sinking of Shelley's boat the " Don Juan " (re- 
christened the " Ariel "), in the squall after she had left 
Leghorn Harbour, was due to foul play. He repeated 



248 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

without variation the account of the matter given in 
his published volume of Records, dwelling particularly 
on the circumstance that he had been himself pre- 
vented from putting out in company with his friends 
in Byron's schooner " The Bolivar " by warnings of the 
quarantine to which he would thereby make himself 
liable, addressed to him from the pier by men affecting 
to be custom-house officers but who turned out not to 
be custom-house officers after all. And he insisted on 
the fact that when the wreck of the " Ariel " was brought 
to the surface her bows were found to be stoven in. 
This belief that the " Ariel " had not gone down by 
accident in the squall but been deliberately run down, 
was one which had by degrees gained complete posses- 
sion of Trelawny's mind, but is not shared by those 
who have inquired most carefully into the evidences. 
Being then, as always, especially interested in all 
that concerns either Keats or Landor, I tried to lead 
the old man's thoughts toward the days (about 1828-30) 
when he was living at Florence in the intimacy both 
of Keats' s friend Charles Brown and of Landor him- 
self. Knowing that it was by a hint of Trelawny's that 
Brown had been induced to adopt a second Christian 
name, Armitage, so that he might be better distin- 
guished from the general tribe of Browns, and that on 
the other hand it was by Brown's suggestion and per- 
mission that Trelawny had prefixed to many of the 
chapters of his Adventures of a Younger Son mottoes 
from Keats's poetry both published and unpublished, 
I had hoped to get from the old man a more living 
image of Brown's person and character than I had yet 



EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 249 

been able to form.* I was very desirous also to hear 
what Trelawny might have to say of that other stiff- 
backed and strong-lunged type of haughty British 
independence and self-will, Walter Savage Landor, 
his senior by some two and twenty years. The two 
had been actually living together at Florence, I knew, 
at the time when Landor had made of Trelawny' s 
adventures during the Greek War of Independence the 
subject of one of the most highly wrought of his 
Imaginary Conversations. The scene is laid in the forti- 
fied cavern of the chief Odysseus on Mount Parnassus, 
and the persons of the dialogue, besides the rebel chief 
himself, are his mother Acrive, his young daughter 
Tersitza, and Trelawny. In the course of the adven- 
ture in the cavern Trelawny had married this girl 
Tersitza, then barely past childhood, and had brought 
her with him when he left Greece to settle for a while in 
Italy. Subsequently, as was his way with wives real 
or nominal, he cast her off, sending her back to her 
own country, but keeping with him the daughter of 
their union, Zella, who grew up under his care to 
womanhood and married comfortably. The references 
to this daughter in Trelawny' s posthumously published 
letters do him, it should be said, nothing but credit, f 

* The best and liveliest material at present extant is to be found 
in the memoir prefixed by the late Sir Charles Dilke to the collected 
papers of his grandfather (Papers of a Critic, vol. i, pp. 3-17). 

f See Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 
C.B., Oxford University Press, 1910. These letters prove, had 
proof been needed, how absolutely groundless is the horrid slander 
concerning his dealings in this matter to which publicity was given 
in W. W. Sharp's Life of Severn, pp. 264-5. 



250 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Tersitza herself also married again some years after 
Trelawny had discarded her. Whether she had been 
still living with him in Italy at the date when Landor 
wrote the Conversation in which the two bear part I 
did not, and do not, know, and should much have liked 
to learn. At any rate Landor, knowing his Trelawny 
intimately and writing soon after the events, has chosen 
to invest their loves with a character exquisitely 
ingenuous and idyllically ideal, making of Trelawny as 
lover a personage possibly true to the life, but totally 
unlike anything one had otherwise ever heard or con- 
ceived of him.* 

But my fishing for talk from the old man either as 
to Charles Brown or as to Landor was vain. Of Brown 
he had nothing to say ; and concerning Landor — 
" a remarkable man, a remarkable man," he repeated 
several times, but would not be drawn into further 
comment except in regard to the mistake Landor had 
made in overrating Southey. Some general remarks on 
poets and poetry ensuing, Trelawny declared his great 
admiration for William Blake, whose work, unread 
and ignored among the associates of his youth, had 
only in later years become known to him through the 
publication of Gilchrist's Life and Rossetti's reprints. 
He proceeded to recite standing, with the full force of 
his tremendous voice, some stanzas of Blake's poem 
" London " from the Songs of Experience : — 

* The reader who thinks of turning to this dialogue for himself 
should perhaps be warned that the charming part of it is only in 
a few pages at the^ beginning, while the rest discusses the Greek 
politics of the hour in a strain superlatively tedious. 



EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 251 

In every cry of every man, 

In every infant's cry of fear, 
In every voice, in every ban, 

The mind-forged manacles I hear, — 

and so forth. 

By this time we had sat with our entertainer a long 
while ; and I could see by the impatient demeanour 
of the two terriers that we had outstayed the hour 
at which they expected their master to take them out 
walking. When we rose to go he accompanied us into 
the hall. Newton, in shaking hands, congratulated 
him on looking so very well considering his age, and then 
turned to put on his coat : whereupon I could hear 
the old man, standing behind him, and conscious no 
doubt of his own fast declining health, growl to him- 
self " 'S'very well, s'very well ' : that's the kind o' lies 
I was talking of : lies, lies, lies." His last words to 
us were nevertheless kindly. It did not need the notes, 
which on this single exceptional occasion I took at 
the time, to keep vivid in my mind the image of this 
hard-bitten, keen-visaged, bull-voiced, rich-memoried 
veteran as he stood grumbling, but not unfriendly, on 
his door-step. To have shaken the hand which 
plucked Shelley's heart out of the ashes was an 
experience one was not likely to forget. Scarcely more 
than six months later he died, and his remains were 
removed to Rome to be buried in the grave he had long 
ago secured for himself beside Shelley's. In like manner 
Joseph Severn, dying at Rome some thirteen months 
before, had after an interval of all but sixty years 
been laid to rest beside his own poet-friend, Keats: 



252 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and with the deaths of these two, Trelawny and Severn, 
the great romantic age seemed to many of us to have 
receded out of living touch and reach into a past newly 
intangible and remote. 



CHAPTER XV 

VICTOR HUGO 

With this chief poet and romance-writer of his nation 
and generation, this world-famous great master of 
the sublime and tender and (for the word must out) 
of the preposterous, it was my privilege to come into 
personal touch soon after the calamities of the Franco- 
Prussian war of 1870-1 and the poet's return from 
exile. I used to be often in Paris in those days, and 
among my friends there the most intimate was Philippe 
Burty, a fine and subtle master in the same craft of art- 
criticism as I was trying to ply at home. Burty 
ought to hold a permanent place in the history of that 
craft, if only as one of those who, in alliance with the 
great financier-collector Cernuschi, first Brought the 
love and understanding of Japanese art, in all its forms, 
into fashion among Parisian amateurs and thence by 
degrees among the general public. He was a man of 
exquisite perceptions and sensibilities, with a purring 
and coaxing softness of manner under which lay much 
genuine affectionateness as well as an enthusiastic 
and discriminating love of art : and not only these 
but a staunch courage, proved throughout the horrors 
of the siege and the fierce political struggles which 
followed them. In the days of the re-actionary 

253 



254 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Bordeaux Assembly and the republique militante he was 
a warm adherent, unshaken by the ghastly interlude 
of the Commune, of the liberal causes and of their 
leaders, and was held in equal regard by the poet-seer 
Hugo and the great parliamentary champion Gam- 
betta. Hence his recommendation secured me a 
welcome in the quarters where I most desired it. He 
took me once or twice to see Victor Hugo during the 
master's brief return to Paris immediately after the 
signature of peace with Germany (February-March 
1871). Then ensued the outbreaks of revolution and 
re-action — the Commune and its bloody suppression 
followed by the presidency of Marshal Macmahon — 
during which Hugo could not make France his home 
but had once more to withdraw, first to Brussels and 
then for a while again to Guernsey. Meantime he 
was busy upon his volume UAnnee Terrible, embody- 
ing in every passionate and high-pitched mood of lyric, 
elegy, narrative, invective and satire alternately the 
emotions he had endured during the recent tragedies 
of his country. The volume appeared early in the 
summer of 1872. I reviewed it as well as I could in 
an English magazine, and through our common friend 
Burty sent a copy of the review to the master, holding 
such offering to be due as an act of courtesy though 
knowing well that he could not read my attempt ; 
for his knowledge of English was as vague and wild as 
is to be inferred, for instance, from his christening an 
English character in one of his novels Tom-Jim-Jack 
and from his imagining that the Firth of Forth means 
La premiere de la quatrieme. Burty carried out my 



VICTOR HUGO 255 

request, and I have before me the letter in which he 
tells me so, expressing at the same time his wish that 
he were himself a better English scholar ; assuring 
me that the master had been much touched with some 
words in my last paragraph when they were translated 
to him ; telling further how he, Victor Hugo, was on 
the point of withdrawing again to Guernsey from the 
too distracting calls upon his time and strength in 
Paris ; and ending with some interesting remarks on 
the way in which during his brief return Hugo had 
recovered the poetic ascendancy over younger minds 
which in his absence had been usurped by newer 
poets such as Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle.* 

* Burty's letter gives so close and clear a view of the phase which 
French critical opinion was passing through at this juncture that 
the reader may care to have the text of the relevant passages 
before him : — 

" J'ai recu votre etude sur V Annie, Terrible. Je l'ai lue avec 
un reel interet, regrettant tou jours que mon peu de pratique de 
la langue anglaise me fasse evidemment passer sur des delicatesses 
de langue sans les apprecier. Mais je crois avoir saisi l'esprit du 
fond qui est sain et genereux. Je l'ai porte hier soir a M. Victor 
Hugo et lui ai lu le dernier paragraphe et il en a ete fort touche. 
II quitte Paris tout prochainement, peut-etre demain. II ne peut 
done vous remercier d'ici mais il le fera aussitot arrive a Guernsey, 
il vous adressera la lettre au bureau meme du journal. Je suis tres 
heureux d'avoir ete l'instrument de votre rencontre. . . . Les 
correspondances, les visites, les demandes de secours, l'accablent. 
II a perdu tout son hiver, se couchant fort tard et ne pouvant plus > 
comme a Guernsey, jouir du grand travail du matin. Je ne puis 
que l'approuver, mais j'en suis bien attriste. Personnellement, 
je crois qu'il m'aimait. Mais surtout son gout se retrempait dans 
l'atmosphere toute speciale de Paris. Son attitude politique etait 



256 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

The crisis through which, after the lapse of fifty 
years, Western civilization is once more passing, has 
inevitably thrust into the foreground of all our thoughts 
many of the same grim world-problems as in those days 
most exercised the poet, including that ancient, 
tragical, inveterate historic conflict of Germany against 
France, and that, universal and immeasurably more 
inveterate still, of Have-not against Have. Will the 
reader pardon me if, in order to revive for him the 
special atmosphere of those days and the scope and 
character of the work it inspired in Hugo, I reprint 
here some paragraphs from my review? 

In these leaves written with a proud spirit and with truth, 
these pages of mourning, battle, and affright, if there has gone 
forth against my will the voice of anguish, if I have cried with 
the cry of torture, or so much as once denied my Hope, let that 
voice of my sobbing be stifled and unheard ; I cancel the cry, I 

excellent©, enfin il avait reconquis sur le groupe des jeunes poetes 
de talent l'ascendant que durant son exile avaient pris Baudelaire 
et Leconte de Lisle, hommes d'une reelle valeur, mais incapables 
de vues aussi hautes, aussi fecondes que celles de Hugo. La pre- 
sence reelle est un dogme dans la vie comme dans la catholicisme." 

The master's own letter of acknowledgment followed, but is a 
piece of merely polite formality : — 

" Hautville House, 

8 Sept. 1872. 

Cher Monsieur Sidney Colven, — 

Vou8 avez voulu me laisser a votre passage le plus gracieux 
souvenir. Vous avez ecrit sur V Annie Terrible une grande et 
belle page, d'une haute portee et d'une vraie elegance. Je vous 
remercie par mon plus cordial serrement de main. 

Victor Hugo." 



VICTOR HUGO 257 

erase the word and unsay it.' That is the courageous way in which 
M. Victor Hugo, towards the end of his new poem, takes up his 
old sanguine prophecy of human and universal progress. " Paris 
is the city of destiny and of the dawn, the seat of the future and 
of light, the travailing mother of the To Be ; she has loved much 
and suffered much ; envied be her calamities ; fair is her fate, 
for she bleeds for mankind, and her crown of thorns shall turn in 
the fulness of time to an undying aureole in the sight of the nations." 
— And so on, and again and again. The same confession of faith 
is amplified and re-iterated through page upon page of pompous 
imagery and passionate declamation ; amid the mass of which 
there come and go such lights of tenderness and power as thrill 
the spirit from time to time with the sense of incandescent genius, 
a revelation of the inmost sanctuary of poetry. The creed has 
two articles. The poet says : "I believe in God the Spirit of 
Justice, who is one with the Ideal, Conscience, Liberty ; who is 
the Soul of our Soul, the vast Unknown behind all religions, the 
highest Right, the universal Law, the supreme Immovable, the 
dazzling incomprehensible All. And I believe in Paris, which is 
the city of God, the champion of Justice, the seat of Conscience, 
the martyr of Liberty, the lamp of Reason, the inextinguishable 
hearth of the Soul. . . . When Paris founders, faith turns to 
doubt ; zero is the sum of things ; the goal of our journeying is 
naught. But once more — no ; the heart beats high again ; the 
city shall survive, shall renew her mighty youth ; creation shall 
not prove a mockery ; the pillar of light shall not be a gibbet of 
shame ; there shall not be poison in the fields, the woods, the 
flowers ; history shall not be a frantic and furious chaos of f atalities ; 
the world shall not be a dismal indictment against its Maker ; 
comets shall not need to wring their hair. / to doubt the issue ! 
/ to deny the human progress which is the pivot of the vast move- 
ment of the welded universe ! /, the watcher for the dayspring, 
to despond because the night is long ! Nay, I have done my duty : 
I suffer and am glad : I march on, knowing that nought of all is 
false, knowing that my hope is sure, and steadfast is the firmament. 
And I bid ye hope with me, all ye that love and are cast down : 



258 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and I bear ye witness that the unknown Being who scatters abroad 
splendours, flowers, universes, and takes no count ; who pours 
forth stars, winds, and seasons as from ever-open granaries ; who 
gives forth everlastingly to sky-piercing mountains and dyke- 
devouring seas the gifts of azure and hghtning and daylight and 
the sky ; who floods space with the torrents of light, life, and love 
— I bear ye witness that He who dieth not and passeth not away, 
who spread the book of the world which priests mis-spell, who 
gave beauty for the vesture of the Absolute, who is real despite 
of doubt and true despite of tales — I bear ye witness that He, the 
Eternal, the Infinite, is not as a riddle having no key." But how 
turn the resounding and heroical French verse into cool English 
prose ? . . . 

The democratic philosopher, recurring to the last overwhelm- 
ing plebiscite of France in favour of the Empire, saves his faith 
by going over the old tale of the difference between the People, 
before whom he bows, and the Populace, whom he despises. From 
the chaos of the multitude there can spring fine flashes ; but let 
an evil wind blow, and what then ? The people that surged about 
Gracchus at the rostrum, that made the strength of Leonidas and 
Winkelried (says the poet, plunging at large, as is his way, hither 
and thither into history), of Washington, Bolivar, and Manin, of 
Garibaldi as he marched a Homeric hero among the Theocritean 
hills, of the Convention when it held head against thirty kings, 
and all Europe broke in froth against the pensive grenadiers of 
Sambre-et-Meuse — hail once and again to that sovereign people ! 
But when the priest-driven mob murders honour in Coligny and 
reason in Ramus, insults the severed head of Charlotte Corday,' 
spits upon Aristides, Jesus, Zeno, Bruno, Columbus, Joan of Arc 
— then it is the populace, the many-headed ; then it is blind and 
maddened numbers ; then the tyrant All is as bad as the tyrant 
One. And though all men vote for Caesar, the prophet will have 
them wrong ; no majority shall cow his conscience ; he will say 
that the world goes ill, and wait until this tyranny be overpast. 
He will bend his ear to the tombs of the just of old who threw off 
Hfe rather than bear it with dishonour ; he will ask ces purs tre- 



VICTOR HUGO 259 

passes how long it is fit he should bear the load. Last comes the 
fine image of the snow-storm : " What is it falling round about 
us in the darkness ? Oh, the millions of snow-flakes, and millions 
again ! Oh, the blackness ! Oh, the snow ! — death to any that 
falls asleep in it, dim leveller of things, covering the mountains, 
covering the fields, covering the towns, whitening over the loath- 
some sewer-mouth, filling heaven with avalanche ! How to find 
the way where all is treachery ? " " Ah, but where will all the 
whiteness be, what will have become of the shroud, to-morrow, 
once the sun shall have risen an hour ? " 

August, 1870, is the first month, and gives its name to the 
first section, of the Terrible Year proper. We are admitted to 
the meditations of Napoleon the Little, who, being a mole and 
blind, imagines that he is working in the dark and that his minings 
are concealed ; and says to himself that now is his time, while 
the nations are blinking, to turn true Charlemagne instead of 
gingerbread Buonaparte, to strike his blow for European suprem- 
acy, and put everything upon the hazard of the die. Out upon 
the suicide, fumbling blindly to his doom, and taking the proud 
army of France with him, to lead her without stores, without 
commanders, into the snare ! Do books tell of another felo-de-se 
like this ? — and once more we are off again over all history and 
geography for the answer. An Indian fakir letting the vermin 
devour his body that his soul may go to Paradise ; a coral fisher 
imperilled among Liparaean reefs ; Green in his balloon ; Alex- 
ander marching to Persia, and Trajan to Dacia — all these, anybody 
and everybody who ever ran a risk, ran it for a purpose ; but a 
knave going out of his way to ruin, a Damocles breaking the thread 
which kept the sword from falling, a mountebank emperor cutting 
off his head to keep on his crown — whoever saw or heard of the 
like ? It was in order that Destiny might be fulfilled — that this 
man, being crime incarnate, being the prince of paltriness and the 
pickpocket of potentates, might have such a fall as that the common 
sewer itself must receive his carcase with shame. . . . And so 
we come to Sedan — we hear how in the fatal valley, amid the shock 
of furious hosts, in the midst of thunder, in the hell of slaughter 



260 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and the rain of iron, when all were drunk with the smoke of blood 
and no man thought but of battle, amid the bellowing of the human 
hecatombs and the angry clangour of the trumpet, suddenly from 
one voice broke the monstrous petition : " Let me live ! " Then 
all was over ; a bandit, a bandit had surrendered the sword of 
Gaul and of France, of Brennus and of Clovis, had belied the mighty 
memories of old, had disgraced " the haughty group of battles " 
from Chalons and Tolbiac to Wagram and Eylau ; henceforth 
Agincourt shall smile, Ramilies and Trafalgar shall be pleasant 
memories ; there shall be solace in the thought of Blenheim or 
Rossbach ; Sedan shall be the only word of shame. The poetry 
runs very high throughout this passage of the battle, and culmin- 
ates with an astonishing effect of rhetorical grandeur in the resonant 
catalogue of proper names — the personified Battles with Hghtning 
flashing from their brows and wings, the historic heroes from Heristal 
to Napoleon — that are said to give up their sword upon this day 
of humiliation. 

The prospect of a siege, implying a death-struggle between 
the two nations, opens the chapter of September with one of the 
finest things in the book. " Choice between the Two Nations " it 
is called ; and the poet lets his thoughts range, as they might in 
time of peace and amity, over the glories and excellences of Ger- 
many. There is no greater nation, he says ; the blue-eyed Teuton 
is grand to think of among the confused commencements of Euro- 
pean civilization. Germany wrought order out of the clash of a 
hundred barbarous nationalities ; Germany has been the bulwark 
of the world — has confronted Caesar with Arminius and the Papacy 
with Luther ; German has had Vitikind as France has had Charle- 
magne — and even Charlemagne was a little of a German (alas ! 
alas ! professors English and Prussian, and zealots of historic fact ! 
is that all you can get granted, and at this time of day ?) — Greece 
has Homer ; Germany has Beethoven ; Germany has music for 
her breath, and blends in her mighty symphonies the eagle's scream 
and the trilling of the lark. Germany has her castled crags and 
verdant meadows ; her blonde maidens are like angels as they 
play on the zither at eventide. Her landscape is peopled with 



VICTOR HUGO 261 

heroic legends ; the Hartz, the Taunus, the Black Forest, are 
mystical with hauntings of prophet and demon ; the trees beside 
the banks of Neckar are full of fairies by moonlight. " Germans, 
your tombs are like trophies, your fields are full of mighty bones ; 
Germans," cries the French poet, putting the climax to this cata- 
logue of renown, " be proud and lift up your heads ; for Germany 
is potent and superb." And then he turns to his country, and 
cries — " My Mother ! " All that praise and more to Germany ; to 
France, the cry of her son — " ma mere ! " That is a stroke of 
rhetoric, of obvious literary artifice if you will, but still of the 
artifice which is full of genius and passion : the like comes with 
a like effect in the dramatic writing of this prince of modern play- 
wrights. An immense accumulation of pleadings, of arguments, 
of admissions, or whatever it may be, is balanced in a moment 
with three sudden and pregnant words, a cry from the heart which 
outweighs all reasoning, a thought from the core of things which 
scatters with a breath all accumulations of commonplace expostu- 
lation or conjecture round about them. At the latter end of the 
poem a similar turn is given, a similar bridle put by the poet upon 
his natural volubility, in a passage referring to the burning of 
buildings by the hunted Parisians of the Commune. " You set 
fire to the Library ? " asks the poet. " Yes, I did," says the petroleur. 
Then expostulation : " But it is a crime against yourself and your 
own soul ; it is your own treasure and heritage you are consuming. 
Books are the champions of progress and the poor. What, turn 
against your best friends ! fling a torch amid the Homers, the 
Jobs, the Platos, the Dantes, the Molieres, the Miltons, the Vol- 
taires, the Beccarias ! waste the records of these arch enemies of 
war, famine, and the scaffold, cruelty and prejudice, pride and 
wrath, evil and slavery, kings and emperors ! What, throw away 
your own cure, your only hope and wealth ! " Then comes the 
answer : " But I cannot read ! " The " Je ne sais pas lire " of the 
incendiary outbalances, in its concentrated reproach against 
society, the whole magazine of reproaches which society can bring 
to bear against the incendiary. 

The death-struggle once fairly engaged, the poet can see no 



262 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

longer any good or any justice among the enemies of his country. 
They in their turn are bandits — powers of darkness leagued together 
to extinguish the light of the world, feudal barbarians bent with 
a vindictive instinct on the suppression of the city of the Idea. 
Berlin is incarnate evil, Paris is incarnate good ; Corporal William 
is as bad as pickpocket Louis. It has become a contest of night 
and day ; it is a host of robbers, locusts, devourers in the dark, 
that have come forth to prey upon the sacred place left defence- 
less. History shall hold the marauders up to perpetual shame ; 
" those princes " shall be names of everlasting reproach ; there is 
nothing to take away from the city who girds herself to resistance 
the whiteness of her fame, nothing to redeem the blackness of the 
infamy of those who assail her. She is a pure virgin whose body 
may fall into the hands of the ravisher, but whose spirit shall repay 
them with hatred inextinguishable. . . . 

In the middle of all these rhetorical and sometimes tedious 
generalities of denunciation on the one part and devotion on the 
other, there come fine bursts in almost every key of poetry. Traits 
taken really and directly from the life of the siege, traits of actual 
misery or actual heroism, are put before us, sometimes with tender- 
ness, sometimes with ferocity, in descriptive language of which 
the placid and reserved simplicity will burst up every now and then 
to let through, in language of quite another kind, that sense of 
ulterior mystery and immensity, that familiar presence of elemental 
powers, which always seems like a sea buoying up from beneath 
the thought of Victor Hugo. How shall one define the subtle 
essence of poetry in this piece of contemplative realism written 
''On seeing some dead Prussians floating in the Seine," in which 
the patriot's vindictiveness gives such a strange sting to the brood- 
ing sweetness of the dreamer ? To translate is hopeless : — 

" Oui, vous etes venus et vous voila couches ; 
Vous voila caresses, portes, baises, penches, 
Sur le souple oreiller de l'eau molle et profonde ; 
Vous voila dans les draps froids et mouilles de l'onde ; 
C'est bien vous, fils du Nord, nus sur le flot dormant ! 
Vous fermez vos yeux bleus dans ce doux bercement. 



VICTOR HUGO 263 

Vous aviez dit : ' — Allons chez la prostituee. 
Babylone, aux baisers du monde habituee, 
Est la-bas ; elle abonde en rires, en chansons ; 
C'est la que nous aurons du plaisir ; o Saxons, 
O Germains, vers le sud tournons notre ceil oblique. 
Vite ! en France ! Paris, cette ville publique, 
Qui pour les etrangers se farde et s'embellit, 
Nous ouvrira ses bras . . .' — Et la Seine son lit." 

It is close to this that there falls the passage which goes furthest 
in setting forth the nature of that cosmic ideal, or sum of ideals 
of which we have spoken as the god of the poet's worship. It is 
an indignant outburst in reply to a priest calling him " atheist " ; 
there is something like a precedent for it in Voltaire : but M. 
Victor Hugo need fear no impeachment of his originality, and 
he has never hurled all the resources of literature with greater 
power against an enemy than here ; he has never been more crush- 
ing than in his exposition and proof, how the real atheist is the 
priest with his debased deity of superstition, and the poet with 
his august deity of the ideal the real believer. 

Close to this, again, comes the choicest passage of all that 
are written in another strain which runs through the poem, and 
gives the sense of a peculiar and touching charm as often as it 
appears. The poet is a patriarch ; he has his two little grand- 
children, George and Jeanne. The play and prattle of these infants 
about the ancestral knees, as they live bravely or piningly through 
the hardships of the time, make themselves heard ever and anon 
amid the roar of cannon and the terrors of the Apocalypse. First 
it is an address to little Jeanne on the 30th of September, her 
birthday. She is a year old, and her grandfather tells her how 
she is like a little callow bird waking up to chirp vaguely in the 
warmest of nests, and so pleased to feel its feathers begin to grow ; 
how these are beautiful pictures in the picture-books grandpapa 
lets her finger and fumble — yes, but not one of them half as beautiful 
as Jeanne herself. How the wisest saws in books do not mean half 
so much as can be read in her wondering angel's eyes ; how God 



264 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

is near when she is there ; what a big girl she is getting — a whoTe year 
old ; how everybody is her slave ; and as for poor old grandpapa, 
he only exists for her pleasure and benefit ; how, alas ! the world 
she smiles upon is all at strife ; how the city rings with the clang 
of arms while she is murmuring like a bee in summer woods ; how 
for him, when the humble voice lisps its song and the sweet hands 
are stretched out, all the tumult and terror seem to disappear, 
and God seems to give the beleaguered city His blessing through 
a little child. 

Next, it is New Year's Day, and grandpapa has been out to 
buy the children playthings. They will tell you some day, he 
says to George and Jeanne, how grandpapa was a kind old fellow, 
who did his best in the world, and had a rough time, but was never 
cross to the little ones, and how he did not forget to go out and 
buy them toys in the middle of the famous bombardment ; and it 
will make you turn thoughtful as you sit under the trees. After 
that, things have become too terrible for the little folks to be so 
much thought about ; there has been starvation, despair, capitulation, 
disgrace. " Stroke on stroke ! bolt on bolt ! " — in the midst of 
his country's agony, the poet has his son struck down by sudden 
death ; the little girl and boy are left orphans. That is at Bor- 
deaux, at the time of the voting of the treaty of peace. Then 
comes Paris again ; the Commune, and the redoubled agonies of 
civil war, conflagration, blind and barbarous reprisals. The poet 
has taken shelter at Brussels, has been driven thence by brutal 
clamour ; has felt once more, and hurled at his calumniators, some 
of the scorn of Dante ; has launched plea after plea in mitigation 
of the promiscuous ferocity of the victorious soldiery. In the 
middle of June and bloodshed, the poet has had a thought for the 
children — innocents with hearts like the morning, who know nothing 
of all that is doing, and are quite content to warm themselves in 
the sunlight, though it streams upon them standing amid sham- 
bles. . . . 

There is one instance where an incident calls to Victor Hugo's 
mind some passages of his own childhood ; and this draws from 
him one of those irresistible jets of poetry, in which the blending 



VICTOR HUGO 265 

of rapture and sadness, old enchantments and present sorrow 
alternating to and fro within the pensive brain, is expressed with 
incomparable art. There was a great old building and garden, 
on the south side of the river, the disused convent of the Feuillan- 
tines, where Victor Hugo's mother (she would never be content 
without a garden) set up house when he was a child of seven with 
his father away at the wars, where she lived for several years, and 
gave shelter for a time to the proscribed General Lahorie. The 
site has been greatly changed. JEere Victor Hugo was lingering 
one day during the siege, when he was almost struck by a bomb- 
shell. First of all he fires out into an amusing and characteristic 
burst of invective against the bombshell ; calls it all the names 
he can think of, and asks why it, the child of nether hell, should drop 
forsooth out of the azure vault. Then : — " The man your tooth 
just grazed " had sat down to think. His eyes were looking out on 
a bright dream from amid the darkness ; he was musing : he had 
played there when he was quite little : he was watching an appari- 
tion of the past. That was where the Feuillantines used to be. 
Your stupid thunder crashes to pieces a Paradise. How charming 
it was ! how we used to laugh ! Growing old is watching a glow 
that has faded. There used to be a green garden where this street 
goes ; and the shell finishes, alack ! what the pavement had begun. 
That is where the sparrows used to peck the mustard-flower, and 
the little birds picked quarrels with one another. The wood used 
to be full of gleams that were supernatural ; such trees, such fresh 
air amid the quivering sprays ! Then one was a little flaxen-poll ; 
now one is grey ; one was a hope, now one is a ghost ! Young ! 
one was young in the shadow of the old dome ; now one seems as 
old as it. 

" Le voila, 
Ce passant reve. Ici son ame s'envola 
Chantante, et c'est ici qu'a ses vagues prunelles 
Apparurent des fleurs qui semblaient eternelles. 
Ici la vie etait de la lumiere ; ici 
Marchait, sous le feuillage en avril epaissi, 
Sa mere qu'il tenait par un pan de sa robe. 



266 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Souvenirs ! comme tout brusquement se derobe ! 
L'aube ouvrant sa corolle a ses regards a lui 
Dans ce ciel ou flamboie en ce moment sur lui 
L'epanouissement effroyable des bombes. 
O ] 'ineffable aurore ou volaient les colombes ! " 

It is in the latter months of the cycle, those which follow the 
extinction of the Commune, that Victor Hugo's eloquence reads, 
I think, most like practical wisdom, and his vein of prophecy seems 
to take the colours of real statesmanship. He had been no par- 
tisan of the Commune or participator in it, and had earned plenty 
of obloquy by holding aloof. But indeed his fervent ideal humani- 
tarianism has little in common with practical socialism. He had 
no faith in that movement in which so much that was devoted, 
so much that was generous and heroic, was mixed up with so much 
that was evil, lawless, and self-seeking, and the noble elements 
and the base went to work in equal desperation. And the blood 
boils within him, the spirit of his father rebels, at the demolition 
of the emblems of the glory of French arms. He protests against 
the destruction of the Vendome column : the moment when the 
ropes of the Commune are hauling at that, and when the shells 
of Versailles are pounding at the Arch of Triumph, is of all others 
the moment of his deepest despondency. He denounces the burn- 
ing of the palaces with all his might, and watches it with the bitter- 
ness of despair. But when the troops are in and the massacre 
begins, when the population is being pitched half-killed into pits 
of quicklime, when young and old, women and children, are being 
whelmed in wanton and hideous and clumsy slaughter, then he 
turns round : "I who would not have been with you in victory 
am with you in defeat " ; then he pours forth cry upon cry in behalf 
of justice, mercy, reason, telling the story of the victims with fearful 
reality, urging the folly of the butchers with admirable dignity 
and weight. The poet gives to sights of terror, outdoing the 
grimmest and most ghastly former offspring of his imagination, 
the same sort of tranquil and irresistible evidence which he had 
known how to give to those. An instinctive literary art of the 



VICTOR HUGO 267 

highest kind tells the story of the hunted mother and her dead 
child, of the batch of girls going to be shot, of the boy who keeps 
his tryst with death, of the writhing slaughter- heaps and the horrid 
burials, in words as simple as those which had told of his hold- 
ing on to his mother long ago by a fold of her frock in the garden. 
A right and high sense of the occasion dictates the sections "To 
the Downtrodden," " Flux and Reflux," " At Vianden," in which it 
is urged how all this is preparing an evil day to come, exasperating 
the future, winding up in the way to make everything begin again, 
calling frenzy wisdom — " for suffering is the sister of hatred, and 
the oppressed of to-day make the oppressors of to-morrow." Again, 
these are the thoughts of an exile in a day when the rest of the 
world is gay in June : " Alas ! all is not over and done because 
they have dug a burial-pit in the street, because a captain points 
to a wall where a row of poor folk is to be drawn up for his squad 
to practise at, because they keep shooting at random with musket 
or mitrailleuse as it may chance, shooting fathers or mothers, the 
lunatic, the robber, and the sick together, and because they burn 
in a hurry with lime the corpses of men still bleeding and children 
still warm." 

Brooding over the present horror and the future inevitable 
retribution, the poet knows not where to fix the guilt. Least of 
all will he blame the misguided multitude who do evil through 
ignorance, and who must be very wretched or they would not take 
death so lightly. He will not even greatly blame the party of 
slaughter : — " Nobody means ill ; and yet what ill is done ! " It 
ends in his throwing the blame on the hostile forces of fate, " the 
venomous swarm of impalpable causes," the " gulf," the " abyss," 
the " void," the elemental principles of evil that are akin to the 
elemental scourges of nature, the mysterious plagues and visitations 
that attend upon man's estate. 

The poet-prophet's purpose of permanent renewed 
self-exile did not hold, and late in 1873 he returned 
with his whole household from Guernsey to Paris. 
After trying one or two experimental homes in the 



268 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

suburbs, they settled in two floors of a large house in 
the rue de Clichy. I had a general invitation to 
attend the evening receptions regularly held there, 
and did so several times during visits to Paris about 
1874-6. At these evening gatherings the ex-actress 
and ex-beauty Madame Drouet, the housemate and 
companion of all Hugo's later life even from before 
his wife's death, used to do the honours. He had 
just turned his seventieth year, and his strength of 
body and mind showed no sign of abatement ; while 
his aureole as poet and prophet home from exile was 
still almost undimmed, the various phases of the 
coming anti-romantic reaction, of which Zola and the 
Goncourts were the chief initiators, not having gained 
much effective impetus till later. 

He had a gracious and not too self-conscious 
patriarchal courtesy and cordiality in welcoming his 
guests. His voice was mellow, subdued rather than 
loud, and even when the matter of his utterance was 
declamatory its delivery was serene. His sturdy 
figure and abundant — though not wild or untrimmed — ■ 
white hair and beard, with his firm, easy movements 
and gestures, were full proofs of vigour. His bearing, 
which was that of one conscious of authority and 
tempering it not with condescension but with a be- 
nignant old-fashioned grace, I thought became him 
well. But I thought also that the demeanour of his 
entourage was too submissive in homage, and that the 
silence for which those nearest him gave sign when he 
was about to speak was inconsistent with social ease. 
" Chut, le maitre va parler " — surely it is no false trick 



VICTOR HUGO 269 

of memory which makes me hear one of the group of 
satellite friends, Paul Meurice or Vacquerie or Claretie 
or Lockroy, thus whispering peremptorily to those 
about him, with a corresponding gesture of the hand, 
on one evening when the conversation threatened to 
become general. At any rate to become such it was 
never, in my experience, allowed. 

Of the particular course of talk at any one such 
evening reception I have no memory. Much of it had 
each time to do with the actual polities of the hour ; 
much with memories and anecdotes of his youth; 
some with generalized encouragement and advice to 
juniors ; more savoured of the same habitual blend 
of grandiose idealist theism, patriotism, and optimism 
together which permeates so much of his writing, and 
had just seemed to reach its climax in the Year 
Terrible. 

On two occasions when I presented myself it hap- 
pened that Madame Drouet was ailing and the usual 
evening reception, I found, had been put off. But 
for some reason or by some means, I know not what, 
I was admitted, and on each occasion the poet came in 
from the patient's bedside, slippered and evidently 
anxious, and with a manner of the kindest courtesy 
gave me the best part of an hour to myself. Now, I 
each time asked myself, shall I have the good luck to 
get into touch with any other than the semi-public, 
the expected and almost traditional Hugo with whom 
I had so far become acquainted ? Well, whether it 
were my fault or not, the range of subjects and the 
personality revealed in talking of them did not in these 



270 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

tete-a-tete conversations greatly change. The notion 
I got was of a genius living within a range of ideas and 
emotions vast indeed, but nevertheless fixed and habit- 
ual and of little elasticity. He spoke affectionately of 
his island home at Guernsey, and said how he hoped 
the love of the sea and of all its powers and aspects 
which he had learned there might win him special 
sympathy from a maritime people like ourselves. 
Sincerely I answered that, sea-folk although we were, 
we had produced no poet of the sea as great or any- 
thing like as great as he. When I said something 
of the sympathy which a great majority of English 
people had with his party in French politics, and how 
we were disposed to count the downfall of the Third 
Empire an event almost worth to France the price 
paid for it, he expressed a gratified assent, and in 
his always self-possessed and serene manner uttered 
much the same kind of sentiments about Napoleon 
the Little as fill the pages of VAnnee Terrible. The 
name of Swinburne being mentioned, he showed 
himself informed concerning and gratified by the devout 
homage rendered him, coupled with denunciations 
of the fallen Empire as ferocious as his own, by that 
then youngest and most dazzling poetical genius of 
our country. Speaking of pending work of his own, 
he mentioned the proposed title (never in point of fact 
used) for a new volume of poetry to come — Les Coleres 
Justes. When I ventured to wonder whether the 
author of Les Chdtiments, the lifelong fulminator 
against kings and priests and conquerors and oppressors, 
and all the cruelties and tyrannies and treacheries 



VICTOR HUGO 271 

of the world, could have left many things that deserved 
his anger still unscourged, he assured me yes, there 
remained plenty, and descending to a lower scale 
began to talk scathingly, first of the reactionary 
Assembly of Bordeaux, and next of some of the errors 
and blunders of the military defence of Paris. General 
Trochu (Participe passe du verbe trop choir, as by a 
ponderous enough pun he has somewhere called him) 
came in for a full share of contempt : and then the poet 
went on to dilate on a scheme of defence that should 
and would have been tried had he had his way. What 
should have been done, he declared, was to send up a 
vast number of captive balloons from the beleaguered 
city to the greatest height possible above the Prussian 
lines, a height beyond the reach of their artillery : 
platforms should have been swung in the air from 
between pairs or groups of such balloons ; and from 
those platforms the best scientific chemists of the city 
should have poured down deadly corrosive compounds 
upon the enemy's lines which should have caused his 
hosts to burn up and shrivel and be no more. 

The progress of lethal invention in the last fifty 
years has so far outstripped the dream of the poet- 
prophet as to make his imagined expedient sound 
primitive and futile enough ; yet his manner and 
language in describing it combined, I remember, the 
apocalyptic with the f amiliar in a style which seemed 
impressive enough to his hearer at the time. What 
would he have said could he have foreseen how soon 
the device of the captive balloon was to pass out of 
date : how aircraft would within half a century be 



272 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

steering through the sky almost as confidently as sea- 
ships over the waves, and more swiftly ; how it would 
be practicable to pour down from them such a rain of 
ghastly corrosives, twenty-fold more concentrated than 
those of his dreams, as would instantaneously blight 
and destroy whole cities and populations ; and how, 
if indeed an end should come to wars among mankind, 
it would not be from any growth of brotherhood and 
amity among the nations, but rather from their mutual 
terror of the catastrophes which science and invention 
should have enabled them to inflict on one another. 
Apart from these matters, on both evenings one special 
subject was uppermost in his talk and evidently in 
his mind, and that was the contrast between himself 
and the last great world-poet and sage before him, 
Goethe, in the matter of patriotism. A feeling of 
rivalry against Goethe, a jealousy of Goethe's fame, 
was never far — so I have since heard from those who 
knew him best — from Victor Hugo's mind. For 
much in the historic and romantic past of Germany 
he had (as the section in VAnnee Terrible above abridged 
abundantly shows) a generous admiration, nor had his 
furious and well-justified hatred of nineteenth-century 
Prussia and her rulers extinguished it. But for 
Goethe, who in his view was a German without being 
a German patriot, he had no toleration. Doubtless 
a sense of poetic rivalry helped more or less uncon- 
sciously to intensify this aversion ; but his avowed 
quarrel with him was not for being too much, but 
for being too little, of a German. Love of humanity, 
Hugo vowed, which did not begin at home was worth 



VICTOR HUGO 273 

nothing. Cosmopolitan good- will was a fine thing ; 
no one had preached it more ardently than he ; but 
to love one's own country first and best was the essen- 
tial virtue of man. That while Germany lay trampled 
under the heel of Napoleon Bonaparte, Goethe should 
have gone as a guest to the camp of the conqueror 
at Erfurt was for him a sin unpardonable. Dilating 
on it and comparing his own frame of mind on such 
matters, he wound up by saying, rising at the same 
time from his chair with his hand at his heart, " Moi, 
je regarde Goethe comme Jeanne cP Arc aurait regarde 
Messaline." I have ever since carried with me the 
memory of this typical Hugonian pronouncement, 
and of the full, soft, authoritative and serenely un- 
challengeable tone in which he uttered it. 

The master lived and wrote for some fifteen years 
after that date, and naturally I had from time to time 
work to do and friends to see in Paris ; but for I know 
not what reason, or for none, I failed to seek his 
hospitality again. I wonder whether his appeased 
spirit may now be hovering over his beloved city, 
confirmed in all his transcendental faiths and fore- 
sights by the retribution, outdoing his own direst 
imprecations and most exulting prophecies, which in 
the fullness of time has overtaken her victorious 
enemies of the Year Terrible. 



CHAPTER XVI 
LEON GAMBETTA 

In old days I used to be careless about the 
keeping of letters, even from the most interesting 
correspondents, and the letter from the great French 
patriot and statesman which I print below most 
likely owes its preservation to the fact that I gave it, 
soon after it was written, to a friend for her collec- 
tion of autographs. A recent renewed sight of it 
has brought back to my memory some incidents of 
the acquaintance, not intimate but cordial and by 
me much prized, which I had with the writer in the 
mid seventies of the last century. Those were the 
years, as every one knows, during which Gambetta 
waged and won, against the two extremes of monar- 
chical or imperialist reaction on the one side and 
ultra-radical intransigeance on the other, his fiercely 
arduous, long-fluctuating, up-hill fight for the estab- 
lishment of a sane and moderate republic in France. 

It was in the winter of 1873^4 that I first met him, 
going by appointment to call on him at his modest 
quarters in the Rue Montaigne. I had till then never 
seen him either in the tribune or elsewhere. From 
his reputation as the most impassioned of combatant 
political orators and leaders — or, as his enemies had 

274 



LEON GAMBETTA 275 

it, the wildest of demagogues — I had expected to 
find in him a typical, high-strung, restlessly excitable 
and volatile son of the South. It was therefore with 
some surprise that I found, instead, a substantial 
rubicund person, occupying solidly the middle of a 
broad settee, who welcomed me with quiet geniality 
and proceeded at once to discuss gravely a question 
which was then deeply agitating France, that of the 
freedom of the Press. Within the previous six or 
eight months Gambetta had fought two tremendous 
battles in the Chamber on this subject, one after the 
suppression of the Corsaire newspaper, the other after 
a special gagging law introduced and passed by the 
reactionary Government in July. But in his own rooms 
and to his English visitor he talked of these matters 
without heat or rhetoric, as though for the moment 
his interest in them were historical and abstract. 
He referred much and particularly to Milton's famous 
Areopagitica (or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing) as known to him in Chateaubriand's 
translation. Thence the talk passed to divers mat- 
ters of non-political literature and of art, including 
the English school of painting as he had just been 
studying it in a recent exhibition at Brussels ; and I 
came away realizing what I had not at all known 
when I went in, that here was a man who, intense 
as might be the strain thrown on the energies and 
resources of his being by the daily strife of politics, 
had also outside of politics a richly furnished mind 
and interests unusually keen and varied. For the 
next four years or more I seldom passed any time in 



276 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

Paris without seeking opportunity to know him better. 
Once or twice I heard him speak in public debate at 
Versailles, once or twice at semi-private political 
gatherings of his supporters. More often, that is 
perhaps four or five times, I saw him in the character 
of host at his own breakfast-table, and about as many 
times as chief guest at the evening parties of that 
most zealous and cordial of political entertainers, 
Madame Edmond Adam. 

At Versailles, looking down from the gallery on to 
the floor of the Chamber and watching him shoulder 
his way, genially and at the same time commandingly, 
among the crowd of his supporters, taking one by 
the arm, leaning upon the shoulder of the next, address- 
ing one after another with a different persuasiveness 
or impressiveness or familiarity of gesture and accost, 
I am not sure but that I have been more impressed 
with the sense of born, instinctive leadership in him 
thus conveyed than even by the overwhelming power 
shown by him in set orations from the tribune. For 
the latter kind of exhibition report had pretty fully 
prepared one. It was great, but it was not unexpected, 
to observe how he would begin hoarsely and heavily ; 
how the hostile majority would at first interrupt and 
challenge and seek to silence him with bitter gibes 
and taunts ; how presently that mass of a man would 
take fire and seem to be all enkindled and transformed, 
how the great head and mane of hair would be flung 
back, the hand be thrust forth in sweeping, dominating 
gestures of denunciation or command, the voice roll 
out rich and clear in thundering periods of prophecy 



LEON GAMBETTA 277 

or argument or appeal or menace, till the ranks of 
his enemies would seem visibly to quiver before the 
storm like a field of corn before the gale. 

As to its actual matter, the speech of his which I 
remember as striking me most was at some sort of 
private political or Press gathering (can it have been 
of the staff of the Republique Frangaise ?). When 
toasts were in progress some one rose and volunteered 
a proposal to drink to the Universal Republic. Gam- 
betta would not have it at any price. He leapt to 
his feet and shouted, " Qui done entends-je parler de 
la republique universelle ? N'avons-nous pas assez 
de peine a fonder notre republique a nous ? " And 
he went on to insist how it was the paramount duty 
and need of Frenchmen to sink their own differences, 
to found their own republic firmly, and in so doing 
to avoid above all things bringing fresh dangers on 
themselves by interfering with the politics of their 
neighbours. To enforce these two joint contentions 
had become, with experience and responsibility, the 
master motive of Gambetta's political life. History 
provides scarcely a stronger instance of the way in 
which time's teachings, to quote Shakespeare, 

Divert strong minds to the course of altering things, 

than the transformation of Gambetta within a couple 
of years from a furiously impetuous preacher of revenge 
against Germany into an inculcator, even more impas- 
sioned and reiterant yet, of France's need to live on 
terms of peace and respect with all her neighbours, 
her late despoiler included, until such time as she 



278 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

should be herself again. The wisdom and statesman- 
ship as well as the moral courage of this change of 
course in Gambetta have come, in most minds, to 
be beyond question now ; but at the time the change 
was the cause of much calumnious bitterness on the 
part of his enemies and of painful estrangement from 
some of his friends. But of this more anon. 

At Gambetta' s breakfasts in the Rue Montaigne, 
and afterward in the Rue de la Chausee d'Antin, 
politics were of course always in the air, and from 
time to time one of his special lieutenants, de Freycinet 
or Spuller or Challemel-Lacour or Ranc, might be 
noticed going up to the head of the table for a confiden- 
tial word aside with the chief. But the social atmo- 
sphere was almost as much literary and artistic as 
political. Both by taste and knowledge Gambetta 
could hold his own well and eloquently upon such 
subjects. He had in youth been both a greedy reader 
and a careful note-taker, and his memory was vigorous 
and well stored. In modern literature he loved both 
the great classics and the great romantics, but had 
little appetite for the then new and aggressive school 
of realists. One of the best dissections of Zola and 
his work I ever heard was at Gambetta' s table. It 
was one of the guests, if I remember aright, and not 
the chief himself, who struck me as hitting the nail 
precisely on the head when he declared that Zola 
was under a mere delusion in imagining himself a 
realist ; that he was truly a perverted ultra-romantic, 
the essential note of whose work was the lyrisme 
effrene with which he emphasized and piled up and 



LfiON GAMBETTA 279 

exaggerated the squalid and loathsome. Among the 
habitual guests at these breakfasts, and one of the 
host's most intimate and trusted friends, was the 
famous actor Coquelin, whom I knew independently. 
I have a lively recollection of a day when, after the 
meal was over and cigarettes lighted, Coquelin, seated 
straddlewise and talking- over the back of his chair, 
held forth on the manner in which, if he had the 
chance, he would wish to play the part of Alceste 
in Moliere's Misanthrope. " On peut-etre distingue 
quand on veut" he interjected of himself, with a 
gesture meant to indicate as much : but the idea 
that such a part could fit him only showed that an 
artist incomparable within his range, and brilliantly 
intelligent to boot, could be very imperfectly conscious 
of his own physical limitations. He did, I believe, 
attempt the part afterwards in England (did he also 
in America ?) but never at the Comedie francaise. 

At the salon of Madame Adam in the Boulevard 
Poissoniere Gambetta's special gift and steadfast 
purpose of closing cleavages in his party, of bringing 
and keeping together the divers dissentient and mutu- 
ally suspicious groups which it included, were seconded 
to admiration by the sagacious and single-minded 
goodwill of the host, and still more by the social 
charm and tact of his wife, a woman as cultivated as 
she was handsome and gracious. There too the 
atmosphere, though mainly political, was literary and 
artistic as well. My own chief original passport to 
the lady's notice and hospitality had been my interest 
in Greek art and literature. I was grateful to her 



280 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

for the opportunities her invitations gave me of watch- 
ing her at her woman's work of putting one after 
the other into good-humour, now some fossilized 
doctrinaire of the Left Centre, now some fiery young 
ultra-radical from the south, and now some moody 
waverer between several camps, and so predisposing all 
manner of discordant male tempers to yield to the 
persuasions and arguments by which the chief should 
induce them to sink differences and work together. 
But she had her own unsubduable and passionately 
impatient emotions of patriotism, and could not prevent 
"La Revanche " from being the continual cry not only 
of her heart but of her tongue. After a while Gambetta' s 
policy of never letting the word be uttered, however 
deeply the mind might cherish the purpose, wore out 
and alienated this headstrong feminine spirit. His 
reasoned conviction was that France was bound to 
live on terms of respect and international courtesy, if 
not amity, with Germany until time should bring her 
strength and opportunity to stand up on equal terms 
and demand restitution of the lost provinces or com- 
pensation for them. She crudely and blindly denounced 
this policy as " Bismarckism," and not only their 
political co-operation but their friendship, despite loyal 
efforts on both parts to preserve it, came to an end. 
This happened within a year or two after her husband's 
death in 1877 ; and by 1879 she was devoting her 
whole energies to the foundation and conduct of a 
great literary enterprise of her own, the Nouvelle Revue. 
Here is a document, hitherto unpublished, which 
may serve to illustrate that attitude of Gambetta 



LEON GAMBETTA 281 

towards Germany and the Revanche which was one of 
the chief causes of estrangement between this friend 
and himself. To account for its existence I must 
explain that when I was in Greece in 1876 the German 
minister there was Herr von Radowitz (the "eminent 
interlocuteur" of the letter), a brilliant, still young 
diplomatist who had been until lately Bismarck's secre- 
tary and stood very high in the great Chancellor's 
favour. He and I saw much of each other at Athens, 
and were companions on several excursions and for the 
time being great friends. He having to depart for 
Berlin and I for London about the same time, we had 
agreed to come away together by one of the Austrian 
Lloyd mail-boats proceeding round Cape Malea to 
Trieste. An invitation to dinner for both of us at 
the English Legation coming for the night on which 
we should have started, we decided to change our plans, 
stay for the dinner, which we knew was bound to be 
pleasant, and travel from Athens by way of Corinth 
and Patras, a short cut which would enable us to reach 
Corfu before the arrival of the Austrian mail-boat 
and be picked up there by her. Carrying out this 
plan, we came to Corfu accordingly, and after a few 
hours' rest went down to the harbour for the mail- 
steamer at the hour when she was due. The hour 
passed and she did not appear ; and then another 
hour and another and another, until late in the after- 
noon there came the news that she had been in collision 
with an English cargo ship at three o'clock in the 
morning and gone down like a stone with absolutely 
every soul on board. Thus we two had had as narrow 



282 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

an escape for our lives as was possible to have without 
the least touch or thrill of adventure in it. Inasmuch 
as the change of plan which had brought it about was 
of my proposal, Herr von Radowitz, and afterwards 
his family, chose to look upon me as having saved 
his life, and made much of me accordingly when I 
went to carry out some studies at Berlin the next 
year. Talking incidentally of Gambetta and of his 
position and aims in France, von Radowitz said how 
very highly his moderation and good sense were coming 
to be appreciated in Germany. I have never been 
a meddler in politics ; but this time, fancying from 
my friend's manner that his words were meant to be 
repeated, I wrote to Gambetta and quoted them. It 
was one of the busiest and most trying moments of 
Gambetta' s whole career, but he took the trouble to 
answer me with his own hand, saying how much he 
valued such an expression of opinion, how it confirmed 
his hopes that French prudence and French sincerity 
were justly recognized across the Rhine ; but how at 
the same time it needed all his confidence in the good 
sense of his fellow-countrymen to keep him from 
trembling for the consequences of the reactionary 
coup of May 16 : how nevertheless he was confident 
that the coming elections would result in a victory 
for the party of peace and moderation both in home 
and foreign affairs.* 

* " Mon cher Monsieur Colvtn - , — 

Je vous suis extremement reconnaissant de la lettre si interes- 
sante que vous avez bien voulu m'ecrire. J'avais depuis deja 
longtemps le pressentiment tres vif qu'au dela des Vosges on savait 



LEON GAMBETTA 283 

In writing to Gambetta as I did I had not at all 
realized the extent to which he was making it his 
own duty and business to inform himself at first hand 
of the state of political and military affairs in Germany. 
In his reply he naturally does not give me the least 
hint of the fact, which has since come out, that he had 
actually himself, barely a month before the date of 
my letter, spent a fortnight incognito in the enemy's 
country observing and studying these matters for 
himself, f His reference in the second paragraph to 

voir et juger sainement et notre conduite et notre sincerite. Mais 
rien ne pouvait plus opportunement me confirmer dans mes espe- 
rances et mes vues que les declarations si nettes et si fermes de 
votre eminent interlocuteur. 

" Toutefois je dois dire, pour ne rien laisser dans l'ombre, qu'il 
me faut toute la confiance legitime que m' inspire le bon sens de 
mon pays, pour ne pas trembler devant les consequences possibles 
de la monstrueuse aventure du 16 Mai. Heureusement nous 
vaincrons et alors il sera donne aux hommes de bonne volonte, 
animes de sages idees liberales et progressives, de donner a tous 
ceux qui au dela de nos frontieres observent revolution de la France, 
des preuves et des gages de leur politique de paix et de moderation 
au dedans et au dehors, Veuillez croire a mes sentiments devoues, 

" Leon Gambetta, 
" 35, Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, 

" Paris, 11 October, 1877." 

f The circumstances of this tour are fully related by Gambetta 
in a letter to Madame Adam dated September 20 and published 
in the sixth volume of her Souvenirs (Nos Amities Politiques 
avant V abandon de la Revanche, Paris, 1908, pp. 388-393). In 
the course of the next year, 1878, pourparlers for a formal and 
public meeting of Gambetta and Bismarck were set on foot, but 
afterwards broken off by Gambetta lest such a meeting should be 
misinterpreted. 



284 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

the pending crisis in France relates of course to the 
consequences of Marshal MacMahon's action, on the 
16th of the previous May, in arbitrarily dismissing 
the ministry of Jules Simon and forming, in the teeth 
of Republican majorities both in Chamber and Senate, 
a ministry of violent reaction under de Broglie and 
Fourtou. Differences among the various reactionary 
parties, and perhaps some bed-rock strain of soldierly 
honesty in the Marshal himself, had saved France 
from the military coup d'etat and attempt at mon- 
archical restoration which had been generally expected 
to follow. The Chamber had been legally dissolved 
and elections for a new Chamber held. The declara- 
tion of the result, so decisive for the whole future 
history of France, was due on October 14, only three 
days after the date of Gambetta's letter to me printed 
above. A large although diminished Republican 
majority was in fact returned, confirming Gambetta's 
prophetic threat that the Marshal would have either 
to submit or resign (se soumettre ou se demettre). He 
first submitted to the extent of appointing a ministry 
from the Left Centre and Left, and about a year later 
resigned. By this time Gambetta had become in 
all men's eyes incontestably the chief personage in 
France. But wisely or unwisely, he did not think 
the time ripe for him to assume the office of Chief of 
the State. First as president of the budget commission, 
then for nearly two years as President of the Chamber, 
then for a short while as Prime Minister, then as 
president of the army commission, he continued to 
be involved in incessant struggles on behalf of the 



LEON GAMBETTA 285 

domestic and foreign policies he thought wise. Mean- 
while every kind of rancorous jealousy and ingratitude 
was unchained in endeavours by his enemies and false 
friends to blacken him in the sight of France as a 
would-be dictator ; and the worst of the obloquy 
thus aroused was only beginning to pass away when 
death overtook him (December 31, 1882). 

During those last four years I was much less in France 
than previously, and saw little of him. Indeed I cannot 
remember that I ever spoke with him after he had 
become President of the Chamber ; or shared his 
hospitality under its new, more sumptuous and cere- 
monious conditions at the Palais Bourbon. Certainly 
I never saw nor suspected — but in this I was practically 
at one with all except the very nearest of his intimates 
— the existence of the tie which had been through all 
those strenuous years the governing fact and secret 
inspiration of his life. Since one of his friends * has 
made public the story of his relations with Made- 
moiselle Leonie Leon, and the determined self-abnega- 
tion which kept that devoted woman from consenting, 
until almost the very end, openly to share the life 
which all the while she was secretly guiding and 
inspiring, the new halo of a great romantic passion 
has been added to Gambetta's ever-growing fame as a 
statesman. 

* Francis Laur, Le Ccewr de Gawhetta, Paris, 1907. 



CHAPTER XVII 

AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 

[1876] 

[It was in Gambetta's company and in talking to 
one of his friends — the poet Heredia if I remember 
aright — that I expressed a special interest in a certain 
kind of coast scenery, not the relatively uniform and 
level kind pleasantly familiar to my boyhood, but that 
on the contrary which presents the sharpest alterna- 
tion and most trenchant variety of character. Cape 
constantly interchanging with bay, creek contiguous 
to spit and every headland sheltering its adjacent 
haven, this was the kind of coast scenery we found 
that we cared for in common : but only when its 
features are not too vast to be taken in and their 
contrasts explored by a traveller of moderate powers : 
not on that grander scale where every inlet amounts 
to a bight and every projection to a promontory. 

My interlocutor agreed with me to the full, and we 
went on to cap and confirm each other in insisting how 
no other kind of scenery is so various as this, none so 
full of contrast, of discovery, of allurement. We 
reminded each other how such a coast at once invites 
you, at every cove and inlet, to quiet sojourn, and 
beckons you, past every headland, to mysterious 
beyonds. The better you know it, the more entertain- 

286 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 



287 



ment you find in its surprises, the more poetry in its 
secrets. Your eye delights to linger along the profile 
of the land where it pushes out farthest on this hand 
or on that, and seems as though it would never dip 




into the sea-line. One day you start to follow out the 
exploration on foot, and then that even-seeming dis- 
tance breaks up and complicates itself before you, 
with jutting of unsuspected nesses and disclosure of 
hidden havens, into a succession of many headlands 
instead of one. Another day you seek, and find if 



288 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

you are fortunate, some inland height from whence 
you can look down, as it were upon the back of your 
hand, upon the coast line and learn all its branchings. 
Do you want peace ? — in the recesses of the bays you 
shall find halcyon shelter. Do you want storm ? — 
there is surf about the reefs and precipices of the 
headlands. In your walks you never know what you 
will come to next. You may think you have turned 
your back upon the sea, but it pushes round farther 
than you know ; as you traverse a moorland you may 
catch the gleam of it unexpectedly in front of you, 
or as you go down through a wood the blue of it may 
strike suddenly up through openings between the 
boughs. Or at a moment when you are wholly taken 
up with inland sights and fancies, with orchards, 
threshing-floors, or hedgerow-flowers, you may hold 
your breath as you become aware all at once that the 
sound of the trees has taken a fuller note, and changed 
into the sound of waves close at hand. At night, if 
you have climbed to some windmill or high place to 
take the freshness and the moonlight, a streak of 
silver far off over the darkness of the country may 
tell you of inland waters of which you had not guessed. 
I had spoken of a particular stretch of the west 
coast of Scotland, from Gairloch to Loch Inver, as 
the region within my knowledge where effects like 
these are to be found touched with the northern gloom 
and grandeur, yet on too great or ungraspable a scale ; 
and on the other hand of the Esterel in the South of 
France, from about Hyeres to Antibes, as the coast 
where the daintiest of headlands adventure the most 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 289 

capriciously into the mast-enchanted sea. My friend 
suggested that I should be well rewarded if I tried 
the coast of the French Cornwall — Cornouailles, Cornu 
Galliae, Horn of Gaul, the most remote and least- 
frequented part of the department of Finistere in 
Brittany. In the company of some friends I took 
his advice, and the following are my notes of the result. 
I let them stand almost as they were written and printed 
at the time (that is in 1876), understanding that in 
the main the character of the scenes described and of 
their inhabitants has undergone little change. The 
railway has been carried on from Quimper to Douar- 
nenez, and even as far as to Audierne, making access 
easier for summer tourists, and considerably increasing 
both their numbers and the accommodation provided 
for them ; but not, I am told, so greatly as to vulgarize 
the ground or much modernize the ways of the people. 
Nature and legend, on their part, are in such scenes 
perdurable and constant, the one almost as much as 
the other.] 

Although Brittany has of late years become holiday 
ground, and receives its contingent of tourists as 
regularly as Switzerland or the Rhine, still curiosity 
or convenience so guides the main body of these that, 
while they crowd both the northern and southern 
seaboards of the country, few by comparison find 
their way to its western extremity, to the land's end, 
or land's ends, for there are several of them, with 
which the Armorican peninsula confronts the Atlantic. 
There is one point only, in all that diversified region to 
the South of Brest, whither people have learnt to go 



290 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

in any numbers, and that is the Pointe du Raz, a 
scene of which the guide-books have made much, so 
that it has become something like a resort for tourists, 
at least of the more enterprising class. 

The nearest railway is at Quimper, the venerable 
capital of the district and seat of its bishopric, a 
pleasant river-side city of gables and fables, familiar 
to every one who has been in Lower Brittany at all. 
To see the Pointe du Raz, you must travel some thirty 
miles due west of Quimper, over a healthy region with 
the sea not far off on either hand, and take up your 
quarters at the little fishing town of Audierne. Like 
many towns on these coasts, Audierne was a great 
place once, but towards the end of the sixteenth 
century disasters came upon it, and it has gone on in 
a dwindled impoverished way, from which it is only 
beginning to revive in consequence of the modern 
expansion of the sardine trade. The waters in which 
its boats ply are very perilous, but among the most 
abounding in the world, and yield, besides the staple 
of sardines, immense numbers of lobsters, crayfish, 
congers, bass, mullet, and mackerel. The town lies 
near the mouth of a river, and consists of a number 
of large stone houses scattered along a wharf under 
a hill ; a mile of well-built jetty or sea-wall prolongs 
the wharf out to the river's mouth, and carries at its 
extremity a lighthouse to guide the fishermen into 
port. It is solemn to walk upon this sea-wall at night, 
and hear the boom of the iron-bound outer coasts, 
and watch the lanterns of a belated boat or two, and 
presently their dim shapes and sails, as they make 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 291 

their way in past the reefs and come slipping before 
a breeze or groaning under oars up the channel through 
the dark. As for quarters, you are not too ill off at 
Audierne. The ways of inns in this part of Brittany 
are always primitive and careless enough, and their 
prices not so admirably low as in some places of the 
Leonnais, farther north. But beds are clean ; and 
here at any rate you may be at ease about your food, 
for your host himself dines at table in the old fashion, 
and carves for his guests and talks to them. He is a 
personage in these parts, le pere Batifoulier, and with 
his comical name and prodigious girth furnishes a 
kindly jest to all the country-side. He is not a native, 
but came from Auvergne five-and-twenty years ago, 
and must have shrewd stuff in him to have made his 
way, as strangers seldom can, among Bretons in Brit- 
tany. His corporation is so vast that a curve has had 
to be scooped out of the head of the table to make 
room for it, and his arms can only just reach out past 
it as he sits, so that he may hold the gigot upright in 
the dish with his left hand while he carves it with his 
right. His bulk was not always as cumbersome as 
it is now, and he has three medals for lives he has 
saved in the harbour. It does you good to hear his 
deep slow voice among the chatter of the table, and 
to see the look of slow humour and kindness which 
plays now and again over his immense swarthy 
countenance. His wife, if you will let her, will pack 
you a great basket with bread and wine, chicken and 
lobster, when you start to spend the day at the 
Pointe du Raz. 



292 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

It is a six miles drive or walk from Audierne to 
the lighthouse which is at the summit of that famous 
promontory. After you get clear of the frequent 
hamlets, which make this desolate region seem more 
desolate with the sense of a population living where 
there are no apparent means of life, and after you 
pass from among the innumerable stone walls with 
which they fence off fields where nothing seems to 
grow, you come out on a plateau with the Atlantic 
close beneath you on either hand. At first you are 
disappointed, for this is like any other heathery and 
stony plateau above the sea ; the height, something 
under two hundred and fifty feet, is not so formidable, 
nor is there anything so very striking in the forms of 
some cliffs that you discern across a narrow bay on 
your right. It is only when you walk on past the light- 
house and dip towards the extremity of the point that 
the character of the place comes out. The plateau 
narrows to a ridge, and you walk no longer among 
stones and heather, but among jumbled masses of 
lichen-stained granite, in the crevices of which only a 
few sea-pinks and tufts of samphire find soil enough 
to grow. Beneath your right hand are sheer granite 
cliffs that become more shattered and fantastic as 
you advance ; the path winds round the heads of 
chasms ; you peer down sudden clefts into the darkness 
of which the sea drives foaming. It echoes and 
booms ; rock and sea tear at one another ; in one 
place the sea has pierced a passage, a mere thread 
wide, through the thickness of the point. But the 
point juts on and on, the riven granite taking wilder 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 293 

and wilder forms, the ridge with its chaos of heaped 
rocks narrowing and narrowing, until at last you 
squeeze your way between two boulders, and find 
yourself at the end of all things. You are face to face 
with an immeasurable vastness. Three-quarters of 
the horizon is ocean. You have to turn about and 
look south-east to descry in that quarter the far-off 
line of bay that ends in the long spit of Penmarc'h. 
To the north, if the day is clear, you can trace out an 
endless succession of headlands, beginning with the 
near Pointe de Van, going on with the many-branched 
peninsula on the hither side of Brest, then passing 
beyond the mouth of Brest harbour along a faint 
interminable line that dips once, and then appears 
again, fainter and further yet, where are the scarce 
distinguishable islands of the archipelago of Ushant. 
But more than the immensity of the sea, more than 
the mysteriousness of those far-ranging coasts, you 
will be struck by what lies immediately under and 
before you. Here at your feet the precipice falls 
away and the ocean-currents sweep ; the land ends 
here ; but the battle is not over yet. From amid 
the waves the granite rears itself again and again. 
One, two, three, great fortresses of black and battered 
rock appear in line out to sea at intervals of half a 
mile or more, and between them lesser crests and ridges 
top the waves by a few feet only. Carry your eye 
along this line, and you come to a long flat island, 
with a lighthouse, lying upon the sea about five miles 
off, and over that, reefs and reefs again to the farthest 
horizon. For this chain of rocks, some visible and 



294 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

some sunken, the remains of a mighty spur of mainland, 
now engulfed, stretches out for near six leagues west. 
The low island with the lighthouse is called the lie 
des Seins, and is inhabited by a few hundred fisher- 
men. It must be the most desolate home in the world. 
It is often unapproachable from the mainland for 
weeks together. The strip of barren soil rises little 
more than ten feet above the sea, and not a tree 
grows on it. The island has a small harbour with a 
jetty, in which the fishing-boats anchor, and whither 
English and other traders come to carry away the 
produce of the fisheries. By their take of lobster 
and crayfish the islanders make a good deal in the 
season, but drink all their money away, and are half 
starved for the rest of the year. Their only other 
resource is the burning of sea- weed to make soda, and 
what waifs and strays they gather from shipwrecks. 
For nothing can persuade the people of these coasts 
to keep their hands off flotsam and jetsam. They are 
not wreckers, this thriftless, sodden, banished race of 
the lie des Seins ; nay, they are daring seamen, 
and often heroic in saving and kind in tending the 
castaway ; but they do not think of property as they 
do of fife, and all merchandize that comes upon the 
coast they take for theirs. It is a coast of a terrible 
name for shipwrecks. Much has been done and is 
doing with lighthouses, but nothing can prevent 
the deadly Chaussee des Seins, as they call the chain 
of reefs beyond the island, and the perilous Bee du 
Raz, which is the name of the channel between the 
island and the point, from devouring their yearly 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 295 

tale of lives. On either side of the point the waters 
are full of fish, so that smacks pass to and fro con- 
tinually in the Bee du Raz ; as do greater craft often, 
to avoid the long circuit outside the Chaussee. 

The Breton fisher has a prayer for the passage : ' ' Pray 
God help me through the Raz ; my boat is so little 
and the sea so great ! " And he has proverbs which 
say, " No man passes the Raz without mischance or 
the fear of it " ; and again, " Whoso steers not wisely 
in the Raz is a dead man." The currents past the 
point and among the reefs are such that it scarcely 
needs wild weather to bid the seaman beware. But 
it is in wild weather that the place is most itself and 
should be seen. Then the whole weight of the Atlantic 
comes crashing against the granite juts and buttresses ; 
then the caves re-bellow, and the seas storm the cliffs, 
and dense foam drives over the plateau, and a man 
cannot hear himself nor stand. This I have never 
seen, but only how the Raz looked on a summer's 
day when the air was still, with a sense of distant 
thunder, and the quick lizards came peeping and 
slipping as lightly as leaves over the hot rocks about 
me. The Atlantic was burning blue, and very calm — 
but in that calm what a perfidy : the waves could not 
keep from booming ; the tide swung against the point 
and between the chain of rocks with the force of a 
cataract, but smoothly until it met the current, when 
it broke into a sudden race with the crossing of a 
myriad shocks and the leaping of innumerable crests. 
Against the adverse smoothness a fishing- crew laboured 
with wind and oar in vain ; along the thickest of the 



296 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

race a shoal of porpoises passed with leap and fling; 
cormorants with their necks out flew their straight 
low flights ; the sea-gulls wheeled and called. Pre- 
sently the swing of the tide grew slacker ; there was 
a half hour when the sea ebbed confusedly all ways 
instead of one, and then the race began again, only re- 
versed. Meanwhile something strange had happened to 
that forlorn island in the offing. It had disappeared, 
and in its place there brooded over the sea a dense white 
shroud, which presently came spreading thinly, and 
with an ashen odour, to the land. It was only the 
smoke of the burning kelp, which had been thicker 
than usual that afternoon, and had hung in the still 
air ; but the sight had a thrill in it, and made one think 
of all the mysterious things that have been said and 
believed about the place. 

For the lie des Seins is a ghostly island, an island 
of Souls, as in truth that afternoon it looked no less. 
The awfulness of the coast, the peril of the seas, the 
weirdness of that minute inhabited desert in the 
midst of the seas, have possessed the imagination of 
the people. Between the Pointe du Raz and the 
Pointe de Van there is a narrow bay ending in a straight 
shore of sand; and behind the sand a great mere full 
of bulrushes in a gloomy valley. The bay is called 
La Bale des Trepisses, Dead Men's Bay, partly no 
doubt from the natural terror of the place, partly because 
to these sands is washed the drowned body of many 
a seaman, partly because of tales which tell how in 
this place, between the sea-waves and the mere, the 
spirits of the unburied dead assemble in the night-time, 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 297 

and claim with moanings a passage to their home. 
The belief, as it is said to exist among the people to 
this hour, is very like what we find recorded by Pro- 
copius thirteen hundred years ago. Hear Procopius, 
in Holcroft's spirited English : — " Along the ocean 
shore over against Brittia " — by Brittia Procopius 
makes it clear that he means the island of Britain, 
and by the parts over against it the peninsula we call 
Brittany — " along the ocean shore over against Brit- 
tia are many villages inhabited by fishermen, husband- 
men, and boatmen, who traffique in the island. . . . 
They have the employment of conducting Soules 
departed imposed on them by turns ; when any 
man's time comes, they goe home to bed towards 
night, expecting their fellowe conductor, and at 
midnighte they finde the door opened, and hear a softly 
Voice calling them to the business ; instantly they 
rise, and go down to the sea-side, finding themselves 
constrained to goe on, but they perceive not by whom ; 
Boats they find ready, with no men in them, and 
aboard they goe and sit to their Oares. They perceive 
the Boats loaded with passengers even to the deck, 
and the place of their Oares not an inch from the 
water ; they see nothing, but after an hour's rowing 
come a land in Brittia, whereas in their own Boats 
they have much ado to pass over in a Day and a Night, 
having no Sailes but rowing only. And they instantly 
land their Fare, and are gone away with their Boats 
suddenly grown light, and swimming with the current, 
and having all save the Keele above water : They 
see no Men leaving the Boates, but they heare a Voice 



298 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

relating to some, who it seemes stayes there for them, 
the names of the Passengers, with their Titles, and 
additions of what Fathers they were ; and (if women) 
what husbands." Procopius's story thus is that the 
souls are ferried from Brittany to Britain, but others 
say, to that mysterious island nearer home. Again 
Claudian, in his invective against Rufinus, makes 
Tisiphone emerge from the mouth of hell at a place in 
Gaul : " there is a place where Gaul spreads forth 
her farthest shore — beyond it stretch the waters of 
the Ocean — where Ulysses is said to have drawn to 
him the silent host by his libation of blood : there is 
heard the wailing clamour of shades that flit with a 
thin cry." When Claudian writes thus of the mouth 
of hell, it seems almost as if he too had heard of such 
traditions as linger still about the lie des Seins and 
Dead Men's Bay. Much learning has been spent, 
and some of it patently mis-spent, in trying to identify 
these places with other allusions of ancient writers. 
Suffice it that here, even in the stillest summer, we 
find a spell that works upon us strangely — how much 
more then upon the storm-beaten imaginations of 
those who live and die, with awe handed down from 
generation to generation, amid the sights and sounds 
of the place. 

A still stronger experience of gloom and desolateness 
is in store for one at another point of the coast. If 
the reader will look at the little map farther back, he 
will see that the Bay of Audierne is terminated at 
the south-east by a point called Penmarc'h. Instead 
of the plateaux and precipices of the Pointe du Raz, 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 299 

the land here juts out low and very flat. But it is 
treacherous all the more. The whole coast is fringed 
with a deep border of black rocks, not lofty or threaten- 
ing, but lying piled in long shelves and tables between 
sand and sea — here cleft with gullies up which the 
waves hurry with stealth, there running out in long 
spits and bars over which they foam savagely, and 
again studding the blue for miles with detached points 
and fragments. One would say it was a coast impos- 
sible for seafaring. And yet on these deserted sands 
stood a city that was once among the richest in the 
Duchy. Penmarc'h in old days could equip her 
three thousand men-at-arms, and shelter behind her 
jetties her fleet of eight hundred craft. She had her 
Drapers' Street and her Jewellers' Street, her almost 
independent communal government, her burghers who 
used, they say, to toss their wine only from golden 
cups ; her goodly spires and towers ; her army of 
stoled ecclesiastics. Upon the plain where the rich 
city stood are now a lighthouse, three or four squalid 
fisher-hamlets of a dozen houses each, the remains of 
half a dozen churches, a few fragments of tower and 
crenelation, the gables of a few fallen houses, and 
many tell-tale mounds and uneven lines upon the 
sand. A score or so of fishing-boats hang their nets 
to dry in a scanty anchorage between two spits of 
rock. Never has been such a downfall so close within 
man's memory. The first blow to the prosperity 
of Penmarc'h was struck by the English, who descended 
here in 1404 under Admiral Wilford, and to whom 
the place, being unfortified because of its extent and 



300 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

the nature of the ground, yielded easy plunder. 
Against similar chances the citizens tried fortifying 
private houses and churches ; nevertheless they were 
continually harassed by pirates. The great source 
of their wealth, besides a large trade with Spain, was 
a bank of codfish off their coast, the richest then 
known. Presently changes in the bars and currents 
took this resource away, and later the cod fisheries of 
Newfoundland superseded theirs. The changes of bar 
and current by degrees also made their anchorage 
more dangerous. And so the city was on the decline 
already, when the great blow came to it thus, at the 
end of the sixteenth century. The wars of the League 
had brought upon Brittany a more cruel anarchy than 
upon any other part of France. Marauding partisans 
fortified themselves wherever they chose, and harried 
the country. The most ferocious of these, the young 
Guy Eder of Fontenelle, came one day, from his island 
stronghold in a bay to the North, insinuated himself 
into the good graces of the Penmarc'h burghers and 
their wives, and then sprang upon them with his 
cut-throats, burned, sacked, slew, and finally trailed 
off to his island a booty that loaded three hundred 
boats. That day made an end to Penmarc'h. The 
best part of its surviving inhabitants scattered them- 
selves among other better defended towns. The 
descendants of the remainder are the scanty fisher 
population whom you find to-day. 

This, too, is a place where people go to see as a 
sight the warfare of the elements. The thunder of 
these reefs, the rush of the waves upon these ledges, 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 301 

the storm of sand and spray along the plain, the 
mingling of earth, heaven, and ocean, are in their way 
not less impressive than the spectacle of the Raz. One 
day five years ago * the sea dealt in this place a felon 
stroke. Two ladies and three children had come to 
watch a storm, and were standing in front of a cabin 
which a painter had built for himself just out of reach 
of the waves. It was no very great gale, but the painter 
called out to them to mind or the spray would wet them. 
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when from 
a gully in the rocks beside them a sea leapt up, and 
swept them in a moment to their deaths. A cross 
clamped into the rock marks the place. The inhabit- 
ants declare that no wave was ever known to break 
so far before. The husband of one of the ladies 
was serving in Paris at the time ; he wrote to her 
as the besieged did write to their friends, by balloon, 
for two months afterwards, and only learnt his loss 
when upon the capitulation he made haste to these 
coasts to find her. What I witnessed at Penmarc'h 
was no scene of storm or peril, only the close of such 
another summer's day as at the Raz. The sun sank 
red and glorious upon a pearly sea, and facing it a 
broad pale silver moon rose above the misty land. 
From sun to moon there was drawn overhead a great 
arch of clouds narrowing towards either horizon — 
clouds — films — how shall one call those luminous 
fleeces spanning the firmament, that magic of amber 
flame and thin-drawn gold against the blue ? How 
tell of the gradations of the sky from zenith to 

* I.e. in 1871. 



302 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

horizon, the melting of sapphire into chrysoprase 
and ruby and topaz ? In the shoreward water, barred 
with rocks and broken into pools, the subtlety of 
that transition was lost, and the reflections cast up 
were like a dark-set mosaic of different coloured 
lights, pearly and rose and blue. With all this 
pageantry in sky and sea, what a sense of desolation, 
of ruinousness and death. Thin fumes of burning 
kelp hung over the plain, the hot air felt as if it had 
contagion in it. As the twilight fell, and one stumbled 
along the uneven bents between the great lighthouse 
and a church built almost on the sands, where fisher- 
men give thanks for safety, the ghostliness of the place 
grew more and more. Flights of petrels flitted swift 
and shrill among the rocks ; anon a hoarser curlew 
whooped. On the land grew beds of the dry sea- 
poppy, with its twisting pods and frail yellow blossoms ; 
and presently came a bed of another flower and set 
the last seal of deathliness upon the place. On the 
thinnest of the sand the narcotic thorn-apple {Datura 
stramonium) put forth its long bells, pure white and 
fantastically five-folded, from among its thick growth 
of leaves and spiky seed vessels and rank stems — an 
ominous bloom, having, as Gerrard puts it, " a strong 
ponticke savour, that offendeth the head when it is 
smelled unto," and growing among waste places and 
the haunts of human decay. Gathering a handful 
of these beautiful ghostly flowers in the moonlight, 
it felt time to hasten away under one knew not what 
gathering fever and oppression of the spirits. 

But the reader has had enough of desolation, whether 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 303 

masked or manifest, enough of iron cliffs, and places — 

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea- 
gates, 
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits. 

There is monotony in this, and I began by vaunting 
the variety of my favourite scenery. Well, to appre- 
ciate that, there is no need to go farther than the bay 
enclosed between two of our promontories, the Pointe 
du Raz and the Cap de la Chevre. On its shores 
there is abundant choice. To explore them properly, 
you must make your headquarters at Douarnenez, 
the town which stands at its innermost south-eastern 
recess (the bay is about fifteen miles by ten) and from 
which it takes its name. It was an island close to 
Douarnenez, the lie Tristan, that the brigand Fonten- 
elle chose for his fortress, and whither he trailed his 
three hundred boatloads of plunder from Penmarc'h. 
For five years he was master of the town and island. 
From those five years, which saw the ruin of so many 
neighbouring places, the prosperity of Douarnenez 
seems to have begun. It has gradually taken the lead 
of other fishing-places on the coast. The bay of 
Audierne yields the heaviest takes, but can only be 
fished in fine weather ; while except in great westerly 
gales, the bay of Douarnenez is one vast roadstead, 
with a perfect anchorage, and in all weathers there is 
refuge in the double harbour of the port itself. The 
great extension of the sardine trade took place soon 
after 1860. Large fortunes were made ; the fisher 
population was doubled and trebled by the influx of 



304 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

country folk anxious to share in the profits and high 
wages of the fishery. (A similar circumstance is 
recorded of Penmarc'h in the fourteenth century.) 

A great part of the town is new, and the houses and 
factories are solidly built of stone, without a thought 
of the picturesque ; their rows of plain square piercings 
make them look like child's houses. One long street 
streams down a hill from the old parish church of 
Ploare, and from the foot of this the town parts into 
three, one part running straight down upon rocks 
that project into the bay, a smaller part sloping to 
some wharves and sardine factories beside an estuary 
on the left, the largest part to some more wharves and 
many more sardine factories on the right, beside a 
small artificial harbour built in the innermost nook of 
the bay. "It is difficult," wrote a commissioner 
appointed near the end of the eighteenth century to 
report on the moral, physical, and statistical aspects 
of that then terra incognita, the department of Finistere 
— '• it is difficult to see a town more ill kept than 
Douarnenez, despite the prosperity and rich trade of 
its inhabitants. The want of police, the want of order, 
allows rotten sardines and decomposing brine to be 
flung into the street ; it is impossible, even in winter, 
to smell fouler smells than those that greet one on 
approaching the town ; they are insupportable, in 
summer, to any one not used to them from infancy." 
Cambry's words are hardly too strong for the Douarne- 
nez of to-day. The population, under fifteen hundred 
in his time, is nearly nine thousand now. The sources 
of the place's prosperity show themselves in a hundred 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 305 

ways, innocent and offensive. All the grown men and 
boys are drawn seaward, and man the fleet of four 
hundred boats which is mustered between this port 
and the dependency of Treboul. Almost all the 
young girls are employed in the factories, on the various 
processes of preparing, cleaning, preserving, and 
packing the fish. The patient mothers with their clean 
anxious faces, their heavy cloth petticoats and great 
white caps of various fashion — these are left alone to 
do the household work and mind the troups of brawling 
children. One feels kindly to these women, for their 
lot is hard, with their menkind engaged on a pre- 
carious trade, and given to drink in good times and 
despondency in bad ; and kindly to these children 
too, when they do not brawl and scream too loud, 
for they have merry open faces, and the tiny girls are 
sweet to look at with their rings of dark or yellow hair 
escaping from under the layers of close caps that are 
put on them. Girls and boys alike, the monkeys, will 
stretch out their hands to you with a peremptory 
" Donnez-moi un sou ; " not that they much expect 
one, and will send you on your way with a cheery 
guttural " Bon- jour " whether they get it or no, and 
then fall chattering and laughing among each other in 
their own tongue, which, being beyond your learning, 
somehow gives you a sense of superior attainment in 
the creatures. But although some few of one's im- 
pressions of the people may thus be touching or 
bright enough, in the main one has to confess that 
they seem a demoralized race. Husbandmen who have 
turned fishers, Bretons who have ceased to be primitive 



306 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

without becoming civilized, traders newly enriched, 
they have no stedfast character or traditions, and 
care chiefly to make money out of the stranger while 
they can. They are slovens and horribly unclean. 
Not only do strips and shavings of waste tin, punched 
for making the sardine-box of our breakfast-tables, 
glitter in great heaps about the banks — there would 
be small harm in that — but waste brine from the 
salting, waste oil from the pickling, spoiled bait from 
the fishing, and all the odious refuse of the factories runs 
decaying in the gutters, and makes some parts of the 
town intolerable ; nor are these the worst defilements. 
But all these drawbacks will be nothing to the 
traveller or the artist who has once stayed long enough 
to become aware of the beauty of the neighbourhood, 
which is a continual feast. From the hill-ranges to the 
bay, the country slopes down with alternations of 
character the most singular. Barren moorlands, often 
partitioned with great banks and hedges, yet growing 
nothing within these divisions but gorse, fern, and 
heather, are terminated above the sea by black precipi- 
tous cliffs. Between these tongues of moorland, and 
dividing them, come valleys the greenest that you 
ever saw, with meadows of lush grass and galingale, 
and osier-beds and fields of grain and hemp, and 
burdened orchards, and homesteads hidden among 
great clumps of elms ; and at the sea such valleys are 
terminated by level lengths of sand, in which you will 
find not the tenderest shell once broken. And so the 
whole shore of the bay is a succession of wild cliffs 
alternating with perfect sands, the length of each 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 307 

extending generally for a mile or two at a stretch. 
In some places the richest inland verdure comes down to 
the very sea itself, in a way that seems fabulous. One 
such place is close north-eastward of the town. Foot- 
paths lead you down, among great moist banks grown 
with mossy beeches, elms, and sycamores, some of 
them of noble size, upon a tiny emerald meadow which 
is set, within great tangled hedges, upon the very 
rock itself. Farther on, the richest jungle of brambles, 
sloes, hazels, and honeysuckles hangs upon the face of 
the cliff. You may sit with the shadow of this verdure 
about your head and your feet dipping into deep 
transparent sea, and watch the great green woodpecker 
go from stem to stem of the trees, and the kingfisher 
flash from point to point of rock. It is not easy to 
be tired of this sea, with its deep pure colour and 
splendour beneath a summer sky, with its far-spread 
gildings and marblings when the sun plays through 
clouds, with the ominous sudden darkness that hangs 
over it when storms gather along the Black Mountain, 
with the busy fisher fleets putting in or out that people 
it in almost all weathers. But if any day you do feel 
tired of the sea, it is easy to turn landward and ex- 
change it for sights of scarcely less charm and variety. 
This is not a good country to walk through, as a 
tourist walks, because of the high banks and hedges 
that shut out your view from the roads ; but to walk in, 
as one walks who is staying in a country, it is perfect. 
Do not keep to the high-roads, but find your way at 
large. The Breton peasant does not himself love 
high roads, but has a track of his own wherever he 



308 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

wants to go. Innumerable single tracks or lanes of 
this kind, sometimes up between the brooms and 
brambles on the top of a great bank, sometimes deep 
down in a hollow between two banks, sometimes over 
the open moor, lead secretly winding and doubling 
from hamlet to hamlet, from farmstead to farmstead, 
from one wayside sanctuary to another, from windmill 
to cottage, from field to wood, nay, oftenest of all 
from nowhere to nowhere. Not one of them but will 
lead you to pleasant sights, and out of one character 
of soil — and with soil, of climate — to another. The 
still, marshy hollows have one atmosphere, the tinkling 
brooksides beneath the trees another, the bleak landes, 
and clumps of lonely pines upon the ridges, a third. 
There is only one unity in it all, and that is in its 
colour. Hardly anywhere have I seen the colours of 
landscape so rich — so solemn and at the same time so 
vivid. The greens even of Ireland as I remember 
them are pale beside the intensity of these in moist 
places. The heather is of a larger kind and a much 
brighter purple than with us, and in dying takes a rich 
lingering russet that gives a singular beauty to the 
moorlands. The mosses and lichens are of a redder gold 
or a softer silver than elsewhere. The honeysuckle has 
larger flowers and more brilliant berries. The black- 
berries are as large and rich as mulberries with us. There 
are places where ferns and loosestrife become colossal, 

and dank moisture feeds 
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth. 

The fields of buckwheat bloom with a creamier white, 
and ripen with stalks of a richer and more transparent 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 309 

amber and crimson than in other places. The sheep 
are all black, or rather of a fine velvet brown. To 
this rich colouring of nature the costume of the people 
answers admirably. It is a picture to come, as one 
constantly does, upon a group of women kneeling 
at their washing round an open tank beneath the trees ; 
their dresses are of various deep sound blues that only 
improve by wear and washing, relieved by the white 
of their caps and perhaps a touch of chocolate in their 
aprons and of rose or yellow in their kerchiefs. So, 
too, of the men ; the peasants of these parishes wear 
on holidays some three or four sleeveless embroidered 
jackets, comically short, over their sleeved waistcoats ; 
and for jackets and waistcoat alike they must have fine 
cloth from Montauban, of different shades of blue, but of 
no false dye or new-fangled make, or they will none of it. 
But I have spoken only of the natural sights of this 
neighbourhood, and they are only half its charm. 
It abounds also in interesting works of man's hands. 
This is not a country where you find such obvious and 
impressive monuments of ancient worship as the 
famous single stone of Dol, or the league-long ranges 
of Carnac ; but lesser stone monuments of the same 
order are plentiful on the desolate levels of the landes, 
here as in all the rest of Brittany, and are often not very 
easy to distinguish from the blocks which nature her- 
self has plied and jumbled. And there are remains 
to be sought for of Gaulish oppida, and Roman camps 
and feudal castles. And there are the little covered 
sanctuaries dedicated to some saint or other, at every 
spring of water ; and chapels in glades of the woods ; 



310 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and most abundant of all those crosses, Calvaries, in 
grey stone, that stand wherever a few houses are 
clustered together, and often in lonely places where you 
see them by themselves against the sky. Sometimes 
they are rich, these shrines of wayside prayer, and 
have figures of all the twelve Apostles standing about 
the foot of the cross ; more commonly the column 
rises from a plain base of steps, and carries only at its 
summit the weather-worn images of Christ and of his 
mother. Both for these outdoor stone carvings, and 
for wooden images in the churches, there is a local 
style of much uncouthness, which continues still in 
practice and which one must not take as necessary 
evidence of antiquity. The churches themselves 
in these parts, with a few notable exceptions, belong 
to a belated provincial Gothic of the sixteenth or 
seventeenth century ; they are always built on high 
ground, and with their steeples of open work, in 
which you can see the bells a-swing, form one of the 
most characteristic features of the country. 

Then, over and above the visible works of nature 
and of man, every spot of soil or sea is full of legend 
and poetry. Wherever one has to do with Celts, that 
people of poets, one finds them atoning for all the 
disasters of their history by what has been well called 
a system of imaginary revenges. One finds them 
inventing a heroic past that never was ; consoling 
themselves for the failures of their destiny by beautiful 
fancies, and throwing a grace over their hard unhopeful 
lives with romantic dreams, traditions, usages. These 
extremities of the Breton Cornwall, above almost all 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 311 

other places, have been the haunt of the Celtic spirit 
and its poetry. I do not know how much of it still 
lives, either in memory or custom, among the people, 
whose ways are changing fast; but what has been 
collected in books is enough to make the whole ground 
alive to one. There is one great myth common to the 
Celtic race in many places, the myth which tells of a 
mighty city submerged for the wickedness of its 
inhabitants. In Ireland, the waters of Lough Neagh 
are supposed to cover the vestiges of such a city ; 
and in Wales, the bay of Cardigan. But the myth has 
associated itself, in most detail and consistency, with 
this bay of Douarnenez. As a matter of fact, traces 
of Roman roads leading from inland to the bay, traces 
of Roman buildings on the lie Tristan and at many 
points of the shore near the town of Douarnenez, 
point certainly to an important station which existed 
at this point of Gaul, and on ground upon which the 
sea has at least partially encroached. These remains, 
in the days when legends grew, must have been far 
more conspicuous than now. The popular imagina- 
tion seems to have taken hold of them, and of the 
reputation of a certain Gradlon, who, as far as real 
history shows, seems to have had an historical existence 
as count over a small principality in the Black Moun- 
tains in the sixth or seventh century.* With these data, 

* I waive of necessity all notice of the discussions which have 
raged in this matter between inquirers of different schools, for 
Gradlonism is a war-cry ; but the result seems to be that the great 
King Gradlon of the fifth century seems to have been created by 
the Breton imagination out of a small Count Gradlon who lived 
in a later time. 



312 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

and with that national myth of a submerged city in 
their brains, the people have fashioned a legend like 
this : — 

Gradlon the Great was King of all Cornwall, and 
had his capital at Quimper. When he and his kingdom 
were converted by Saint Corentin, he made over the 
city of Quimper to the government of that saint, and 
went to live and rule his dominions from another city 
by the sea. This city was called Is, and was one of 
the mightiest and goodliest in the world. But men 
lived there too riotously. It was built on low ground 
beside the sea ; and the waters were kept out by a pair 
of great sluice-gates of which no man had the key — a 
key of pure gold — but the king only. Now King 
Gradlon had a daughter, the Princess Dahut, and loved 
her dearly. But Dahut cared neither for God nor man, 
and was first in all manner of riotousness ; and the 
lovers that were brought to her nightly she was wont 
to murder before dawn, and send their bodies to be 
flung into a pit far within the country. So God was 
angry against Dahut and against that city. And 
one day King Gradlon met Saint Corentin (or as others 
say his disciple Saint Guennole) in the forest of Nevet ; 
and the saint said to him, " Beware ; for the wrath 
of God is about to make itself felt against thee and 
thine." But the king took no heed. And one night 
after the feast was over, the foul fiend came in the guise 
of a lover to Dahut, and caressed her, and asked her 
for the golden key from about her father's neck. And 
Dahut went to her father where he slept, and took the 
key from about his neck, and gave it to her lover. 



AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 313 

And the foul fiend vanished away, and took the key, 
and turned it ; and the sluice-gates were opened, and 
the waters went over the city. And King Gradlon 
leapt upon his horse and rode for life ; and Dahut 
begged with a great voice that he would take her up 
behind him. And he took her up ; but the sea pursued 
them ; and a voice cried, " Let go the accursed one 
that rides behind thee," and Dahut's arms were 
loosened, and she fell and was drowned, and the 
waters were stayed ; and the place where she fell is 
called Poul-Dahut to this day. 

Poul-Dahut is the modern Poul-David, the estuary 
that separates Douarnenez from Treboul. And there 
are a hundred tales told how Dahut still haunts the bay, 
and may be seen sitting on the rocks in the form of a 
siren, a presage of ill-weather ; and how Gradlon's 
horse still ranges the country at night with tramp and 
neigh ; and how in calm weather the fishermen look 
down through the blue, and see upon the sands of the 
bay the ruins of the wicked city — 

Old palaces and towers 
Quivering beneath the wave's intenser day. 

Nor is that the only cycle of legends that haunts this 
region. The Celts of Brittany have a whole calendar 
of their own saints, and in places round about you 
shall be shown how Saint Corentin had his hermitage 
here, and Saint Guennole or Saint Ronan wrought a 
miracle there, and so on without end. And as usual, 
emigrants from the island of Britain have not only 
carried the great Arthur cycle with them to these 



314 MEMORIES AND NOTES 

coasts, but their descendants have identified its scenes 
with the places among which they themselves lived. 
Thus the lie Tristan, anciently and properly, it would 
seem, called Tutuarn after a saint of that name, has 
got to be thought of in connection with Sir Tristram 
of Lyonesse. And Plomarc'h, which is the name of 
that point of richest verdure, of woodpeckers and 
kingfishers by the rocks, is pointed out as the home of 
King Mark, the uncle of Sir Tristram and husband 
of Sir Tristram's mistress in the same legend ; whereas 
in truth the whole tenor of the legend demands that. 
Mark should have been king not of this but of our 
island Cornwall. Marc'h, Mark, means a horse, and 
it is curious to find the tale of Midas told of this King 
Mark of the popular imagination. He had horse's 
ears, and used to put all his barbers to death for fear, 
they should tell of it. One day he suffered a friend, 
sworn to secrecy, to do the barber's office and live 
afterwards. The friend must needs go and whisper 
the secret to the sands of the sea. In the place where 
he whispered there sprang up three reeds ; certain 
bards cut these reeds to make music with, and the 
secret came along the music — Plomarc'h, Plomarc'h, 
the King of Plomarc'h has horse's ears. Again, when 
clouds roll in a dark procession, as one sees them some- 
times, along the ridge of the Black Mountains and 
over the Mene-Hom, they say it is Arthur and his 
knights that ride abroach and take it for a sign of 
coming war. 



INDEX 



Acropolis, the, 227, 229 

Seen from Lycabettus, 238 
Adam, Edmond, 279 
Mme. Edmond 

Salon of, 275, 279-80 
Souvenirs by, cited, 283n. 
Tastes and Politics of, 280 
Adventures, The, of a Younger Son 

(Trelawny), 241 
Advertisement, the demon of, 47 
^Egina, Island of, 227, 238 

Seen from Lycabettus, 238 
Agamemnon (iEschylus), Browning's 

Translation, letter on, 86-7 
Airy, Sir George Biddell, Astronomer 

Royal, 35 
Aldeburgh, Suffolk, Crabbe's poems 

on, 26 ; extracts from, 28, 

29 
Alderton, Giles Fletcher at, 24-5 
Amazing Marriage, The (Meredith), 

166, 168 
Andrea del Sarto (Browning), 

Browning's reading of, 84 
Annie, L\ Terrible (Hugo), 269, Col- 

vin's review of, 254-5 db n., 

extracts from review, 256 

sqq. 
Aphrodite, Head of, and Gladstone, 

193, 194. 
Archaeology, museum of, opened at 

Cambridge, 221-3 
and Excavations, 210 sqq. 
Architecture, vulgarization of, in 

modern London, 47 
Areopagitica (Milton), referred to, by 

Gambetta, 275. 
" Ariel " (or " Don Juan "), Shelley's 

boat, sinking of, Trelawny 

on, 247-8 



Aristophanes' 1 s Apology (Browning), 

80 
Art, V, d'etre Grand-pere (Hugo), 114 
Art Criticism of 

Burty, 253 

Colvin, 8, 48, 253 

Buskin, 41 sqq. 
Athens, Aspects of (1873), 224 sqq. 

Atmosphere of, qualities of, 228 
sqq. 

First sight of, 217, 225 sqq. 

Funeral monuments in, 236-7 

Hills surrounding, 230-1 
Athenians, present-day, 229, 230, 233, 

235-6, 237, 239 
Attwater, in The Ebb-Tide, and Dew- 
Smith, 127 
Audierne, 289, 290-1, 292 

Bay of, 298, 303 
Austen, Jane, and Box Hill, 163 
Austin, Alfred, C.B., 154, 160 

Charles, 159-60 

Family, gifts of, 154, 159 sqq. 

John, 159 
Autobiographical Notes (W. B. Scott), 
on Rossetti, 74 

Babington, Professor Churchill, his 
wife, and R. L. S., 103 

Balaustion's Adventure (Browning), 79 

Balfour, Rev. Lewis, 103 

Barrie, Sir James, 151 

on the Death of Meredith, 187-8 

" Barry Cornwall," 89 

Barrons, the, of Norwich, 160 

Barton, Bernard, Poems of, 19-20, 
30 sqq. 
Miss, marriage of, with Fitzgerald, 
34 

Batifoulier, \e plre, 291 



315 



316 



INDEX 



Baudelaire, — , 255 
Bayley, William Butterworth, 14 
His daughter and the Indian 

Mutiny, 15 
Beach, The, of Walesa (Stevenson), 

149 
Biamarck, Prince, and Gambetta, 

projected meeting between, 

283». 
Blacas Collection, the, 213 
Black Arrow, The (Stevenson), 137 
Bloomsbury, and the British Museum, 

201 
Black Mountain : Brittany, 307, 311 

Legends of, 314 
Blake, William, poems of, Trelawny 

on, 250-1 
Bolivar, the, Byron's Schooner, and 

Trelawny, 248 
Bordeaux Assembly, the, 254, 271 
Borough, The (Crabbe), 27 ; quota- 
tions from, 28-9 
Boswell and Johnson, 174 
Botticelli, Sandro, 52 
Boulge Hall, and the FitzGeralds, 34, 

36 
Bournemouth, R. L. S. at, 141 sqq. 
Box Hill, George Meredith at, 162 

sqq. 
Literary associations of, 162-4 
Boys, response of, to R. L. S., 104, 

124-5 
Braemar, R. L. S. at, 134 
Branchidse, figures from, 211-12 
Brest, 289, 293 
Bride of Lammermoor, The, Glad- 

stone on, 197-8 
Bridges, Robert, Poet - Laureate, 

poems of, and R. L. S., 

122-3 
British Museum, the, associations of, 

201 sqq. 
Collectors' gifts to, 206-7 
Colvin's life, home, work, and 

contemporaries at, 8, 141, 

143, 172-3, 201 sqq., 207 
Brittany, Celtic Saints in, 312, 313 
Rambles in, 289 sqq. 
Ruins in, 309-10 
Scenery &c. of, 286 sqq. 
Brown, Charles (Armitage), and 

Trelawny, 248, 249»., 250 



Browning, Mrs. Barrett, death of, 76 
" Pen," and his father, 89 
Robert, American story told by, 85 
Characteristics of, 78, 79, 80 

sqq., 86, 89 
Letters from, to Colvin, 86 sqq. 
Memories of 76 sqq. 
Meeting with, at Naworth, 191 
Poems of, 79, 80 
Readings by, of his own poetry, 

83-4 
and R. L. S., 143 
Talk of, 78-9, 80 
Buchanan, Robert, attack by, on 
D. G. Rossetti {Fleshly 
School of Poetry), 72, 75 
Burford Bridge Inn, Keats's Stay at, 
164 
R. L. S.'s stay at, 167, 168-9 
Burne-Jones, Edward, 44, 45 
Characteristics of, 48, 52-3 sqq. 
Friends and admirers of, 48-9, 53, 

55 
Letters from, to Colvin, on Aubrey 
de Vere's Irish poems, and 
on R. L. S., 55 sqq. 
Paintings of, 48, 51 

Artists' appreciation of, 48 
Collectors' discovery of, 49 
Colvin's enthusiasm for, and 

friendship with, 48-9 
Sadness in, 52-3 
and R. L. S., 57, 143 
Range of Reading of, 54 sqq. 
and Rossetti, 60, 61 
Watts's Portrait of, 58 
Burney, Fanny, 164 
Burton, F. W., drawing by, of George 

Eliot, 91 
Burty, Philippe, Art Critic, 253-4 
Letter from, on Hugo, and Col- 
vin's review of IS Annie 
Terrible, 256 & n. 
Butcher, Sir John George, Bt., M.P., 

167n. 
Butler, Dr. Montagu, 85 
Byron, Lord, and Trelawny, 240, 
241, 242 



California, R. L. S.'s life in, 128-9, 
130 



INDEX 



317 



Calvary Crosses, Brittany, 310 
Cambridge Days and Memories, 8, 

10-12, 19, 43, 60, 103, 172, 

221-2. 
Cameron, Mrs. (Julia), and her 

Photographs, 93-4 
Cardigan Bay, and the submerged 

city myth, 311 
Carlisle, Rosalind, Countess of (the 

late), and her guests, 77-8, 

193 
Carlyle, Thomas, Browning on, 81 

Literary Style of, 124 
Carnac, 309 
Casino, the, of Monte Carlo, A 

suicide in, 113 
Castellani, collections bought from, 

for the British Museum, 

213 
Caterpillar and Hen, story of, 221 
Catriona (Stevenson), 57, 149 
Cernuschi, — , and Japanese Art, 

253 
Celtic Saints, in Brittany, 312, 313 

Traditions, 310 sqq. 
Challemel-Lacour, — , 278 
Chdtiments, Les (Hugo), 270 
Chaussee d'Antin, Rue de la, Gam- 

betta's abode in, 278 
Child's Garden of Verses (Stevenson), 

57, 137 
Children, little, attitude of, to 

R. L. S., 115, 124 
R. L. S.'s interest in, 107, 114 
Churches in Brittany, 310 
Claretie, Jules, 269 
Clark, J. W., 12 

Sir Andrew, and R. L. S., 106 
W. G., 12 
Clarkson, Thomas, at Playford, 35 
Claudian, cited on a place like the 

Baie des Trepasses, 298 
Clermont-Ferrand, R. L. S.'s adven- 
ture at, 110-11 
Clichy, rue de, Hugo's home in, 268 
Clifford, Professor W. K., 119, and 

R.L.S., 120 
Cockfield Rectory, R. L. S. at, 103 
Codfishery of Penmarc'h, fate of, 300 
Collections, purchased for the British 

Museum, 212-13 
Collectors, Psychology of, 205-6 



Colvin Family, 13, 14-15 <fc n. 

James, in the Indian Mutiny, 14-15 
John Russell, and the Indian 

Mutiny, 14-15 <fc re. 
Sir Auckland, 15n. 
Sir Sidney, adventure of, at Corfu, 
281 

Boyhood, 13 sqq. 

Cambridge Days and Cambridge 
Posts, 8, 10-12, 19, 43, 60, 
103, 172, 221-2 

Critique by, of Rossetti's poems, 
60, extracts from, 66, 67 sqq. 

Dissent by, from Henderson's 
estimate of The Bride of 
Lammermoor, 197 re. 

Education 
Early, 12, 18 
Later, 10, 18-19, 48 

Early Literary joys, 16 sqq. 

Early travels, 19, 41 

Journalist days, 8, 48 

Letters to and from R. L. S. 
and his wife, on settling 
in Samoa, 146 sqq. 

Life, home, work, and con- 
temporaries of, at the Bri- 
tish Museum, 8, 141, 143, 
172-3, 201 sqq., 207 

Life of Keats, by, 9 

Love of, for Nature, 19 sqq. 

Parents of, 13 sqq. 

Review by, of Hugo's U Annie 
Terrible, 254; Burty on, 
254-5 & n. ; Hugo on, 255 ».; 
Extracts from, 256 sqq. 

Rossetti's " Limerick " on, 74 

Rossetti, Critical praise of by, 
60, 66, 72 

Sporting tastes of, 17-18, 23-4 

Travels of, in Greece, 217; 
Olympus, 219 ; Athens, 
217, 224 sqq. 

Views of, on Juventus Mundi, 
193 

Visit of, to Finistere (1876), 
289 sqq. 

Work of, as Art Critic, 8, 48, 
60, 66 sqq., 253 
Colvin, Lady, Dedicatory Letter to, 

7 sqq. 
Commune, the, in Paris, 1871, 254 



318 



INDEX 



Concentration, Meredith's phrase on, 
and Colvin's Lecture on, 
182 & n. 

" Conciliation or Coercion," 199 

Conrad, Joseph, 152 

Affinities of, with R. L. S., 151-2 
on In the South Seas, by R. L. S., 
149 

Coquelin, Jean (cadet), 279 

Corfu, adventure at, 281 

Cornouailles, 289 

Cosmopolitan views of Meredith, 180 

Cowper, W., poem by, Tirocinium, 13 

Crane, Walter, 57 

Crabbe, George, Place of, in Litera- 
ture, 26 sqq. 
Poems of, and feeling of, for his 

district, 25 sqq. 
Style and Matter of, 26 sqq. 

Greeting Mill, the Austins of, 159 

Cunningham, Alison, 137 

Dahut, Princess, legend of, 312-13 

Darwin, Charles, 156 

Datura stramonium at Penmarc'h, 

302 
Davos, in R. L. S.'s day, 131-3 
Deben River and its tributaries, 22 
Barton's verses on, 19-20, 32-3 
de Freycinet, — ,278 
de Goncourts, the, 268 
Deirdre and Cuchulain, legend of, 54 
Demeter, Statue of, from Cnidos, 211 
de Vere, Aubrey, friends and poems 

of, 54-5 & n., 56 
Devil, the, and Dahut, legend of, 

312-13 
Dew-Smith, A. G., and R. L. S., 126-7 
Diana of the Crossways (Meredith), 

166, 173 
Dick Naseby, in The Story of a Lie 

(R. L. S.), prototype of, 116 
Dickens, Charles, Literary style of, 

124 
Novels of, Burne-Jones's joy in, 
56, 58 
Dilke, Sir Charles, on Charles Brown, 

249?i. 
Dilettanti Society, the, 216 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 

141 



Dol, monolith of, 309 
Donne, John, lines by, 82 
Douarnenez, 289 

Beauty of Surroundings, 306 
sqq. 
Colour in, 308 
Sardine Trade at, 303 sqq. 
Bay, 303 
Doyle, Richard, 38 
Drouet, Mme., and Hugo, 268, 269 
Duff Gordon, Lucie, Lady {nee 
Austin), 159 

Early Italian Poets (Rossetti), 

87 
East Suffolk Poets, see Crabbe, Fitz- 

Gerald, and Giles Fletcher 
Ebb-Tide, The (Stevenson), 149; 

character in, 127 
Echetlos (Browning), Browning's 

reading of, 84 
Edinburgh society and R. L. S., 105 
Edinburgh Review, Fleeming Jenkin's 

articles in, 156 
Egoist, The (Meredith), 166, 172, 173 
Elgin, Earl of, 204, 216 
Elgin Marbles, The, 203-4, 220, 232 
Endymion (Keats), 164 
Enfants, Les (V. Hugo), 114 
England, Meredith's attitude to, 177- 

80 
English Accentual Stress, 183 

Painting, State of, circa 1886-7, 

49-50 
Esterel Coast, beauties of, 288 
Euphranor, by Edward FitzGerald, 1 1 

Faery Queene, The, Colvin's 

delight in, 17-18 
Felixstowe, 25 
Fenton, attempt of, on Trelawny, 

243, 247 
Feuillantines, Convent of, Lines on, 

by Hugo, cited, 265-6 
Fifine at the Fair (Browning), 79 
Finiguerra, Maso, 45 
Finistere, visit to (1876), described, 

289 sqq. 
FitzGerald, Edward, 30 
Characteristics of, 33 sqq. 
and his Euphranor, 11 



INDEX 



319 



Friends and friendships of, 33, 34 
Poems of, 33 sqq. 
John Purcell, father of Edward 

and John, 34 
John Purcell, brother of Edward, 
34, 35-6 

Fitzwilliam Museum, Colvin's Direc- 
torship of, 8, 11, 221-2 
Gallery at, of Casts from the 
Antique, 221-2 ; Newton's 
speech at opening of, 222-3 

Fleshly School, The, of Poetry (Bu- 
chanan), Rossetti's anger 
at, 72, 75 

Fletcher, Giles, 24-5 

Florence, 233 

Flying Victory, The, of Paionios, 219 

Fontainebleau, and Fate for R. L. S., 
128 

Fontenelle, Guy Eder de, and the 
sack of Penmarc'h, 300, 303 

Footnote, A, to History (Stevenson), 
149 

Foster, Birket, 48 

France, affairs in, in Gambetta's 
day, 274-5 ; relations with 
Germany after 1870, Gam- 
betta's influence on, 277-8, 
280 sqq. 
the Land's End of, a visit to, 286 

sqq. 
War-devastated, 46 

Francesco da Rimini (Leigh Hunt), 
135 

Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, 253 

Franks, A. Wollaston, 208-9 

Freedom of the Press in France, 
struggle over, Gambetta's 
share in, 275 

French excavations at Olympia, 217 

Froude, John Antony, and Carlyle, 
81 

Fuller, Thomas on Suffolk air, 25 

Funeral Monuments in Athens, 236-7 

Fynn, the brook, 22 

Gainsborough, Thomas, and Land- 
guard Fort, 32 
Gaisford, Captain, 242 
Lady Alice, 242 

Thomas, Dean of Christ Church, 
242 



Gambetta, Leon, 254, 286 

Aspects and characteristics of, 

275 sqq. 
Oratorical powers, inborn leader- 
ship, 276-7 
Attitude of, to French relations with 
Germany, change in, 277-8, 
280, 281, 282 
Career of, 274-5 
Conversational topics, 278-9 
Death of, 285 

Letters from, 274, 282 & n. 
Love Story of, 285 
Memories of, 274 sqq. 
as Statesman, 274-5, 277-8, 280 
sqq. 
Garnett, Dr. Richard, 207-8 
George Eliot, at the Priory, 90, 
sqq. 
Appearance and characteristics of, 
90-1, 92 
German Archaeologists, Excavations 

by, 216 sqq. 
Germany 

Gambetta's attitude to, 277-8, 280, 

281, 282 
Gambetta's tour in (1877), 283 & n. 
and the War, Meredith's foresight 
on, 179 
Gifford, W., praise by, of the Storm 
lines in Cr abbe's Borough, 
29 
Gladstone, W. E., Characteristics of, 
189 sqq. 
Dominance of, over the English 

mind, 189, 190, 191 
Financial attitude of, 195 
Humour of, 198-9 
Juventus Mundi by, 193 
Last meeting with, 199-200 
Memories of, 189 sqq. 
Oratory of, 189 sqq. 
Topics preferred by, 192 
Views of, on Homer, 192 sqq. 
on Walter Scott, 197 
Goethe, W. A., Hugo's denunciation 

of, 273 
Gordon, James, 167 

Mrs. James (Lady Butcher), book 
by, on Meredith, 167<fc n. 
Gosse, Edmund, and R. L. S., 120, 
136 



320 



INDEX 



Gower Woodseer in The Amazing 

Marriage, and R. L. S., 168 
Gradlon, King, legend of, 311 db n., 

sqq. 
Graham, W., and Burne- Jones, 49, 55 
Great North Road, The (Stevenson), 

135, 169 
Greece, Colvin's Travels in, 217 ; 

Olympus, 219 ; Athena, 

217, 224 sqq. 
and Turkey, affairs of (in 1881), 

Trelawny on, 245 sqq. 
Greek Landscape, affinity of, with 

Greek Art, 232 
Greek War of Liberation, Trelawny's 

share in, and book on, 241, 

243, 246, 247, 249 
Greenwood, Frederick, 48 
Guernsey, Hugo's residence in, 254, 

255 db n., 267 

Haufax, Viscount, 198 
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 124 
Hampstead Hill, R. L. S.'s super- 
latives on, 121-2 
Ponds, lines by Keats, probably 

suggested by, 165 
Hatherley, Lord, 35 
Hawes Inn, Queensferry, R. L. S.'s 

use of, 168, 169 
Hebrides, the, and R. L. S., 138-9 
Henley, W. E., as critic, 173 

Joint work of, with R. L. S., 

142 
Sonnet by, on R. L. S., 101-2 
Heredia, Jose-Maria de, 286 
Herostratus, R. L. S.'s projected 

spectacle-play on, 112-13 
History of the Renaissance in Italy 

(Symonds), 132 
Hoar Cross, 198, 199 
Homeric Poems, Gladstone's interest 

in and theory on, 192-4 
Houghton, Lord (Monckton Milnes), 

222 
Howard, George (later 9th Earl of 

Carlisle), his wife, tastes, 

and guests, 77-8, 191 
Howell, Charles Augustus, and R03- 

setti, 64 
Rossetti's " Limerick " on, 75 



Eudibras, quoted by Browning, 87 f 

88 
Hughes, Arthur, 48 
Hugo, Mme. Victor, 268 

Victor, Characteristics of, 268 sqq. 
Books and writings of, on Chil- 
dren, 114, 263-4. 
Letter from, 255n. 
Lines by, on dead Prussians 
floating in the Seine, cited, 
262-3 
on Les Feuillantines, cited, 
265-6 
Manner, voice and conversation 

of, 268 sqq. 
Memories of, 253 sqq. 
Poems and Novels of {see also 
Annee Terrible, V), 254 
sqq., 270, 272 
Hunt, Leigh, on Sport, 23 

W. Holman, and the Pr©- 
Raphaelites, 61 
Hyeres, R. L. S. at, verses on his 

abode there, 135-6 
Hymettus, 230, 238 

Idylls of The King (Tennyson), 
66 

Iliad, Meredith's Translations from, 
183, 184 
and Odyssey, Gladstone's theory 
on, 193-4 

Imaginary Conversations (Landor), 
on an adventure of Tre- 
lawny, 249 db »., 250 

Imagination and the Artist, 50 sqq. 

In a Drear-nighted December (Keats), 
written on Box Hill, 164 

In Memoriam (Tennyson), 66 

In the South Seas (Stevenson), two 
judgments on, 149 

Inchbold, Rossetti's " Limerick "on, 
73 

India, the Colvin family connection 
with, 14-15 db n. 

Indian Mutiny, the, 14-15 

Inland Voyage, The (Stevenson), 110, 
128, 169 
Meredith's letter on, 169-70 

Ireland, visits to, 19, 41 

Irving, Sir Henry, 156 



INDEX 



321 



Is, the submerged city of, 312-13 
Italian poems, Rossetti's translations 
of, 60 



James, Henry, and R. L. S., 142 ; 

death of, 151 
Japanese Art, introducers of, to 

Parisian amateurs, 253 
Jebb, Professor, oratory of, 12, 222 
Jenkin, Mrs. Fleeming (ne'e Austin), 
154 
Death of, 153 
Dramatic powers of, 160—1 
Family and Parents of, 154, 

159-60 
R. L. S.'s affection for, 161 
Professor Fleeming, Characteris- 
tics of, 156-9 
Life- Story and Career of, 153 

sqq. 
Writings of, 156 & n. 
andR. L. S., 119, 152 
Jenny (Rossetti), 65 ; an apprecia- 
tion of, 69-71 ; lines from, 
70-1 
" Jerry Abershaw," tale planned by 

R. L. S., 169 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, and Bo swell 
174 
Lines by, from The Vanity of 
Human Wishes, 185 & n. 
Johnston, Sir H. H., 147 
Juvenal, Meredith's reference to, 

183, 185 & n., 186 
Juventus Mundi (Gladstone), Col- 
vin's criticism on, 193 



Kaye, J. W., on J. R. Colvin in the 

Mutiny, 15 n. 
Keats, John, at Burford Bridge Inn, 
164 
Colvin's " Life of," 9 
Poems of, localities associated with, 
164-5 
Trelawny's mottoes from, 218 
and Severn, 215, 251 
Kidnapped (Stevenson), 141-2 
King, The, of the Golden River (Rus- 

kin), 38 
Kingussie, R. L. S. at, 134-5 



Kipling, Rudyard, 151 
Kouyunjik, excavations at, 210 

Lamb, Charles, and Bernard Barton, 

30, 31 
Landes of Brittany, ruins on, 309 
Landor, Walter Savage, Colvin's 

volume on, Browning's help 

in, letter on, 88-9 
and Trelawny, 248, 249 & n., 250 
Landguard Fort, as subject both to 

Crabbe and Gainsborough, 

32 
Lang, Andrew, death of, 151 ; and 

R. L. S., 117-19 
Lark, the brook, Barton's verses on, 

19-20, 31 
Layard, Sir A., excavations by, 210 
League, the, and Penmarc'h, 300 
Leconte de Lisle, 255 
Legros, Alphonse, 77 
Leighton, Sir Frederick, P.R.A., 57, 

222 
Leon, Mile. Leonie, and Gambetta, 

285 
Leonnais, the, 291 
Letters of Edward John Trelawny 

(Buxton Forman, ed.), on 

Tersitza and Trelawny, 

249n. 
Levant, the, Newton's labours in, 

fruits of, 210 sqq. 
Lewes, G. H., appearance of, 92 
and George Eliot at The Priory, 

90 sqq. 
Leyland, Mr., and Burne- Jones, 49 
Life, its value for itself, Fleeming 

Jenkin on, 158-9 
Life of Keats, by Colvin, 9 
" Limericks," by Rossetti, 72 sqq. 
Little Holland House, its inhabitants 

and habitues, 90, 93 sqq. 
Little While, A (Rossetti), Stanzas 

from, 65 
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, as poet, 

76 
Lockroy, Edouard, 269 
London, immensity of, 233 
London Police, the, and R. L. S., 109 
Lough Neagh, and the submerged 

city myth, 311 



322 



INDEX 



Lowell, J. K., 143 ; and R. L. S., 222 

Lycabettus, mount, 227 
Quarrying from, 234 
View from, 238-9 

Macaulay, Lord, literary style of, 

124 
MacMahon, Marshal, President of 
the French, 254 ; and the 
reactionary coup in May, 
1877, 282 & n., 284 
Maison, General, 217 
Malcolm, John, of Poltalloch, Collec- 
tions of, 206, 207 
Mark, King, and the Midas story, 314 
Marryat, Mayne Reid, and Feni- 
more Cooper, Colvin's early 
delight in, 18 
Marseilles, associations with, of 

R. L. S., 135, 139-40 
Martlesham Red Lion, 22 
Mason, George, 49 
Maud (Tennyson), 66 
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the, 

211 
Mediterranean Islands, a talk on, 

with R. L. S., 138 n. 
Mene-Hom, legend of, 314 
Melbury Road, Watts's later home 

in, 97 

Meredith, George, Appreciation of, 

slow but emphatic, 173, 179 

at Box Hill ; Memories of, 162 sqq. 

Characteristics of, 165, 167, 186 

Conversation of , 167, 170-1, 174-5, 

186, 187 
Dachshunds of, 171, 187 
Death and Burial of, Barrie on, 

187-8 
Friends and friendships of, 167, 

171, 172, 173, 188 
Infirmities of, in age, 173, 174, 186 
Letter from, to Colvin, 183 

to R. L. S. on The Inland Voyage, 
169-70 
Literary style of, 175, 178, 181 
Novels and Poems written by, on 

Box ffill, 166 
Personal appearance of, 167, 173 
Poems of, 166, 180-2 
Obscurities in, 181 
Portrait of, by Watts, 172 



Reading aloud of, 181 
and R. L. S., 167, 169-70, 188 
as a walker, 165, 168, 172, 173 
Metres, Classical, Meredith's Experi- 
ments in, 183, illustrations 
of, 184 
Meurice, Paul, 269 
Midas, King, Story of, as told of 

King Mark, 314 
Middlemarch (George Eliot), 92 
Millet, J. F., 52 

Millais, Sir J. E., Paintings by, 45 ; 
Trelawny's likeness in, 243—4 
and the Prse-Raphaelites, 61 
Milton, Areopagitica of, referred to 
by Gambetta, 275 
Lines from, applicable to Glad- 
stone in Debate, 190 
R. L. S.'s delight in, 108-9 
Mitchell, William, Collections of, 

206, 207 
Modern Painters, (Ruskin), 18, 41 
Monckton, Milnes (Lord Houghton), 

54 
" Monsieur Berecchino " (R. L. S.), 

115 
Montaigne, rue, Gambetta's quarters 

in, 274, 278 
Moor, Rev. Edward, of Great Beal- 

ings, 35 
Morris, Mrs. William, 63 

William, and Burne-Jones, 48, 
53, 59 
on Payment for Disagreeable 
kinds of Work, 195 
and Rossetti, 61 
Socialism of, 59 
Munro, H. A. J., 156 
Museum Officials, Occupations and 
Privileges of, 202-4 

Nankin China, Rossetti's passion for, 

62 
Napoleon Bonaparte and Goethe, 273 
Napoleon the Little, 270 
National Service, Meredith's views 

on, 178-80 
National Trust, the, and Box Hill, 

162 
Native Portraiture, in In the South 

Seas, by R. L. S., 149 
Nature, Colvin's Love of, 19 sqq. 



INDEX 



323 



Naworth, the Howards at, and their 

company, 77-8, 191, 192 
Nelitchka, the, of R. L. S.'a letters, 

114, 115, 124 
Nelson, Admiral Lord and Lady 

Hamilton at Box Hill, 164 
New Arabian Nights (Stevenson), 167 
New Poems (Stevenson), 140 n. 
Newfoundland Codfisheries and Pen- 

marc'h, 300 
Newman, Cardinal J. H., 54 
Newton, Mrs. Charles (ne'e Severn), 

tragedy of, 215 
Newton, Sir Charles, appearance of, 

213-14 
Book by, on his travels, cited, 218 
Characteristics of, 210 sqq. 
Memories of, 209 sqq. 
Speech by, on opening of Gallery 

of Casts in Fitzwilliam 

Museum, 222-3 
and Trelawny, 240, 242 
Visit of, to Olympia, 216 sqq. 
Niagara, Falls of, Rapids below, 

Trelawny'8 Swim across, 

241 
Night Thoughts (Young), 195-6 
Nimrud, Excavations at, 210 
North British Review, Jenkin's arti- 
cles in, 156 
"North-West Passage," The, Mil- 

lais's likeness of Trelawny 

in, 243-4 
Norwich, the Barrons of, 160 ; 

the Taylors of, 159 
NouveUe Revue, La, and Mme. 

Adam, 280 

Odysseus, and Trelawny, 241, 249 
Treasures of, 246-7 

Olympia, German excavations at, 
216 sqq. 

Omar Khayyam, the Rubaiyat of, 
FitzGerald's version of, 36- 
7 

Opalstein, in Talk and Talkers pro- 
totype of, 133 

Ordered South (Stevenson), 121 

Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, on Browning's 
manner, 79 

Orwell, River, 32 



Pall Mill Gazette, Colvin's Art 
criticisms in, 48 

Paris, V. Hugo in, 254, 267-8 sqq. ; 
during the Siege, 263-9 

Parnell, Charles Stewart, Gladstone's 
famous phrases on, 199 

Parthenon,the(see also Elgin Marbles), 
first glimpse of, 227 
Seen from Lycabettus, 238 

Pattle, James, distinguished daugh- 
ters of, 93-4 

Penmarc'h, past and present, 298- 
302 ; the elements in war- 
fare at, 300-1 

Pentelicus, 230 
Marble of, 234 

Playford, Notable dwellers at, 35 

Playford mere, 22 

Phaeton (Meredith), lines from, 184 

Phalerum, Bay of, 238 

Piraeus, the, 228 

Plomarc'h, and King Mark, 314 

Poissoniere, Boulevard, home of M. 
and Mme. Edmond Adam, 
279 

Political Economy, Ruskin's teach- 
ings on, 45-6 

Portfolio, The, 124 

Poul-Dahont (Poul-David), legend 
of, 313 

Prae-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the, 
36, 44-5, 61 

Praeterita (Ruskin), 39 

Prinsep, Thoby, and his wife, 90, 
93-4 ; relations of, with 
Watts, ib. 

Priory, The, and its habitues, 90 
sqq. 

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (Brown- 
ing), 79 

Prince Otto (Stevenson), 137 

Private Collectors and Museums, 205 

Procopius, cited on the Baie dea 
Trepasses, 297-8 

Procter, Mrs., and Browning, 89 

Public Buildings, Watts' s mural 
decorations of, 95-6 

Purcell family, the, 34 

Quimper, 289, 290 
Legend of, 312 



324 



INDEX 



Radowitz, Graf von, adventure 
with, 281-2 ; on Gambetta's 
attitude to Germany, 282 
Raj on, 91 
Ranc, 278 
Raz, Bee du, 294, 295 

Pointe du, 290, 296, 298, 303 
Visit to, 291 sqq. 
Eecords of Shelley, Byron, &c. (Tre- 

lawny), 242, 245-6, 248 
Red Cotton Night-cap Country 

(Browning), 79-80 
Red Lion, the, of Martlesham, 22 
Rendel, Lord and Lady, 199 
" Revanche, La," Mme. Adam'a 
obsession with, 280 : Gam- 
betta's policy on, 277-8, 280 
Richard Feverel (Meredith), aphor- 
isms in, 174 
Ring, The, and The Book (Browning), 
179 
Browning's reading of, 84 
Riviera, visited by 
Colvin, 19 
R. L. S., 106, 112 
Rob Roy (Scott), 16 
Robinet, 115-16 
Roman ruins and roads in Brittany, 

309, 311 
Rosabelle, Scott's Ballad of, Ruskin's 

recitation of, 43—4 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Appearance, 
house, manners and habits 
of, 61-2 
and Burne-Jones, 48 
Colvin's support of, 60, 66, 72 
Suggestions to, on the ex- 
humed poems, 64 
" Limericks" by, 72 sqq. 
Memories of, 60 sqq. 
Paintings by, 44, 60, 62, 63 

Favourite sitters of, 63 
Poetry of, 60, 62, 63, 87 
Readings by, of his own poems, 

64 sqq. 
and the Rubaiyat of Omar 

Khayyam, 36-7 
and Symbolism in Art, 51 
Mrs. Dante Gabriel, death of, 61 ; 
poema buried with, ex- 
humed and published, 63-5 
sqq. 



Rossetti, William Michael, 74-5 
Rottingdean, Burne-Jones at, 55, 56 
Rubaiyat, The, of Omar Khayyam, 
FitzGerald's version of, 36-7; 
stanzas from, 36 
Ruskin, John, Appearance of, 40 
Art Criticism of, 16, 41 
Books by, Colvin's delight in, 18 
Characteristics and teachings of, 

40 sqq. 
Colvin's relations with, 40 sqq., 

48 
Literary style of, 40, 41, 124 
Memories of, 38 sqq. 
Political Writings of, 41, 44 ; 
effects of, 47 
Mrs. (mother of John), 38 

St. Cobentin, 312, 313 

St. Gaudens, Bronze Relief by, of 

R. L. S., 142 
St. Guennole, 312, 313 
St. Ronan, 313 

Salamis, Island of, 227, 230, 238, 239 
Salting, George, collections of, 206-7 
Salvini as " King Lear," 84 
Samoa, Life and death in, of R. L. S., 

145 sqq. 
Samson Agonistes (Milton), lines 
from, declaimed by R. L. S., 
108-9 
Sardine Trade, at Douarnenez, 303 

sqq. 
Sargent, J. S., portrait by, of R. L. S., 

142 
Savile Club, the, and R L. S., 119-21 
Scottish West Coast, grandeur of, 288 
Scott, Sir Walter, works of, 56 ; 
artistry of, 16-17, 26; 
Colvin's early delight in, 
16-18 ; the Bride of Lammer- 
moor by, 197 <Sc n. 
Scott, William Bell, Rossetti's " Lim- 
ericks " on, 73, 74; his in- 
accuracies, 74 
Scottish and English Universities, 

contrasts between, 126 
Sea-Cook, The (Stevenson), 134 
Sea-description, an effective, 30 
Sea-poppies at Penmarc'h, 302 
Seins, Chaussee des, 294, 295 
lie des, 294, 296 



INDEX 



325 



Seven Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin), 

41 
Severn, Ann Mary (Mrs. Charlea 

Newton), 215 

Joseph, friend of Keats, 215, 

232 ; burial-place of, 251 
Shadows, transparency of, in Athens, 

229-30 
Shakespeare, Colvin's early joy in, 18 
Shelley, Mrs. (Mary Godwin), 241 
Percy Bysshe, 10 
Death of, 240-1, 247 

Trelawny on, 247-8 
Heart of, rescued by Trelawny, 

240, 247, 251 
Trelawny's friendship with, 240- 

1, 242, 251 
Shilleto, Richard, 12 
Simon, Jules, and the coup of May, 

1877, 284 
Sir Eustace Grey (Crabbe), 27 
Sister Helen (Rossetti), 65 
Sitwell, Mrs. (later Lady Colvin), and 

R. L. S., 7, 103, 104, 122-3 
Skye, Isle of, visits to, 55 
Slade Professorship of Colvin, 8, 11, 

43, 103 
Smart, Christopher, stanzas by, 83 
Somers, Virginia, Countess (nee 

Pattle), 93 
Sompting, Trelawny's home at, 242 
Song of David (Smart), stanzas from, 

83 
Songs of Experience (Blake), 250 ; 

Stanzas from, 251 
Songs of Travel (Stevenson), 146 & n. 
Sons, The, of Usnach (de Vere), 54; 

lines from, 55n. ; letter on, 

from Burne-Jones, 55 
Southey, Robert, 250 
Souvenirs (Mme. Adam), 283n. 
Spartali, Miss Mary, 63 
Spenser's Faery Queene, Colvin's 

delight in, 17-18 
Spuller, 278 
Sport, Colvin's early love of, 17-18, 

23-4 
Stephen, Mrs. Leslie 

the first 172 ; the second, ib. 
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 170, 171-2; 

Character based on, by 

Meredith, 172 



Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., character of, 
129, 130 ; letter from, 147 
Stevenson, Thomas, 105, 129 

Robert (Bob), 128, 168; on 

R. L. S., 150 
Robert Louis, attire of, 107 sqq. 

Books by, Burne-Jones's love 
for, and letters on, 56 sqq. 

and Burne-Jones, 56-57 

in California, 128-9, 130 

Characteristics of, 102 sqq., 167 

Collaboration of, with Henley, 
142 

Colvin's first meeting with, 7, 
102-4 

Colvin's letters preserved by, 
150 

as Critic, and Meredith's writ- 
ings, 173 

Death of, 148 

Friends and Friendships of, 7, 
102, 103 sqq., 107, 113 sqq., 
119, 120, 122-3, 126, 132-3, 
136, 142, 143, 152 sqq., 167, 
188 

Health of, 100, 101, 105, 106-7, 
130 sqq. 

Inspiring talk of, 105 

Literary style of, 124 

Marriage of, 128-9 

Memories of, 98 sqq. 

One moment of despondency, 
143 

Personal appearance of, 99 sqq. 
107 
Henley on, 102 

and the Police at home and 
abroad, 109 sqq. 

Portrait and Relief of, 142 

Roamings of, in search of 
health, 131 sqq., further 
wanderings, 144-5, life in 
Samoa, 146, letters thence, 
147-8, death, 148 

and the Savile Club, 119-21 

Spell of, over Boys, 104,124-5 

Superlatives of, 121-3 

Two aspects of, 98-9 

Visits of, to Colvin's British 
Museum home, 141, 143 
Writings of 

Dramatic (with Henley), 142 



326 



INDEX 



Stevenson Robert Louis (con- 
tinued) — 
Writings of 

Prose, 98-9, 115, 121, 127-8, 
133, 134, 135, 137, 141-2, 
149 sqq., 167, 168, 169 
Verse, 136, 137, 140 <fc n., 

164 & n. 
When in Samoa, Colvin's criti- 
cisms, 149-50 
Written conversations with, in ill- 
ness, 143-4 
Stone-breaker, the, and Ruskin, 44, 
Story, William Wetmore, 78 
Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 18, 41 
Storm and Calm in Crabbe's 

Borough, 29 
Story, The, of a Lie (Stevenson), 

autobiography in, 116 
Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, and 

archaeology, 210 
Submerged City, Celtic myth of, 

34 sqq. 
Suffolk, Air of, Fuller on, 25 

Literary Interests and Associa- 
tions, of, 16 
Notable folk of, 24, 25 sqq., 30 sqq., 

34, 35-7, 159-60. 
Scenery of, 16, 19 sqq. 
Worthies, feelings of for their 
country, 24 sqq. 
Suicide Club Stories by R. L. S., 166, 

168 
Sunday Afternoons at The Priory, 
and at Little Holland House, 
90 sqq. 
Sunday Tramps, the, 171, 172 db n. 
Swinburne, Algernon, Hugo on, 270 ; 
and Rossetti's poems, 66,72 
Symonds, John Addington, and 
R. L. S., 132-3 



Talk and Talkers (Stevenson), 
127-8 ; a character in, 133 
Taylor, Sir Henry, 54 
Taylors, the, of Norwich, 159 
Telpherage system of Fleeming Jen- 
kin, 155 
Tembinok, King of Apemama, 149 
Tennyson, Alfiel, 1st Lord, 54 
Arthurian poems of, 66 



Tersitza, Zella, and Trelawny, 
249 & n., 250 

Teuton and Gaul, agelong strife of, 
256 

Thomson, Sir William (Lord Kelvin), 
154 

Thompson, W. A., Master of Trinity, 
12 

Three Colours, The, of Prce-Raphaelit- 
ism (Ruskin), 44-5 

Tinted Statues, reason for, 229 

Tirocinium (Cowper), 13 

To S. C. (Stevenson), 146 & n. 

Tourists, 162 ; Meredith's two voices 
on, 176-7 

Turner Water-colours owned by 
Ruskin, 39 

Tragedy, Gladstone on, 196-8 

Transvaal War (1881), Trelawny on, 
245 

Travels and Discoveries (Newton), 
extract from, 218 

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 
(Stevenson), 128 

Treasure, The, of Franchard (Steven- 
son), 134 

Treasure Island (Stevenson), 134, 141 

Trees and flowers near Athens, 
232 

Trelawny, Edward John, 10 ; adven- 
tures of, books by, and 
later days of, 240-2, 247; 
a meeting with, 240, 242 sqq: 
Burial-place, 251 

Conversation and voice of, 244 sqq. 
Millais's likeness of, 243-4 
Shelley's heart rescued by, 240, 
247, 251 

Trevelyan, G. M., book by, on Mere- 
dith's Poetry and Philo- 
sophy, 182 

Trespasses, Baie des, 296 sqq. 

Tristram of Lyonesse, and lie Tris- 
tan, 314 

Tristan, lie, Arthurian associations 
of, 314 ; and Fontenelle, 
303 

Trochu, General, Hugo on, 271 

UnivebsaIj Republic, toast to ; Gam- 

betta's wrath, 277 
Ushant, Islands of, 293 



INDEX 



327 



Vacquerie, Anguste, 269 

Van, Pointe de, 293, 296 

Vanity of Human Wishes (Johnson's 

translation of Juvenal's 

tenth satire), 185 & n. 
Vaughan, Henry, and the British 

Museum, 206 
Vernon Whitford, in The Egoist, 

model for, 172 
Verrall, Professor, Essay by, On the 

Prose of Sir Walter Scott, 

17ra. 
Versailles, Gambetta's speeches at, 

276-7 
Vienna, 233 

WADD1NGTON, M., French Ambassa- 
dor, 222 
Wales, H.R.H. the Prince of (King 

Edward VII), 222 
Walker, Frederick, 49 
Waterlow, Sydney, book by, on 

Cambridge, 12 
Watts, George Frederick, at Little 
Holland House, 90, 93 sqq. 
Appearance and Characteristics 

of, 95 sqq. 
Personality of, 94 sqq. 
Paintings of, 95-6 
Portraits, 58, 96, 172 
Mrs. G. F., 97 
Waverley Novels, the, 16, 26, 197 
Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson), 149 
Westminster Review (1871), Colvia's 
Essay in, on D. G. Rossetti's 
poems, 60, 66 ; extracts 
from, 67 sqq. 



Wharton, the Duke of, and th© 

poet Young, 196 
Whewell, William, Master of Trinity, 

12 
Whitcombe, and the attempted 

assassination of Trelawny, 

247 
Wilding, Miss, 63 
Wilford, Admiral, and Penmarc'h, 

299-300 
Winckelmann, and German ar- 

chaelogy, 216 
Wisie, Ruskin's dog, 39 
Woggs, R. L. S.'s Skye-terrier, 137 
Women, attitude to, of Meredith, 178 
Women-characters in Meredith's 

Novels, 178 
Wood, Sir William Page (Lord 

Hatherley), 35 
Woodbridge, 13, 14 ; literary and 

notable folk of, 30, 34, 35 
Wordsworth, W., 54 

on Sport, 23-4 
World Reform, 46 
Wrecker, The (Stevenson), 149 



Yarmouth, Countess of, and Young • 

196 
Young, Edward, Night Thoughts by, 

and Gladstone, 195-6 



Zetts, temple of, at Olympia, excava- 
tions at, visit to, 216 sqq. 

Zola, Emile, 268 ; a French criticism 
on, 278-9 



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